gpt-5.6-sol price up to 33.3% cut on 2026-08-22

On 2026-08-22, OpenAI changed the published API price of gpt-5.6-sol. The superseded price had stood for 44 days. This is the only recorded price change for this model in the index.

Every metered token direction on gpt-5.6-sol got cheaper that day. A cut is the direction people notice least, because a lower bill rarely prompts anyone to check what changed.

What changed

Per 1M tokensBeforeAfterChange
Input$5.00$4.00-20%
Output$30.00$20.00-33.3%
Cache read$0.50$0.40-20%
Cache write$6.25$5.00-20%
tier2_cache_read$1.00$0.80-20%
tier2_cache_write$12.50$10.00-20%
tier2_input$10.00$8.00-20%
tier2_output$45.00$30.00-33.3%

What it meant in practice

On a reference workload of 50M input and 5M output tokens a month, this change moved the bill from $400.00 to $300.00 a month, a difference of $100.00. The workload is a fixed reference used on every event page so the figures are comparable between them, not a measurement of anyone's usage.

Your recorded history should not change when prices do

A cost tracker carrying a single current-price table would reprice every gpt-5.6-sol session you ran before 2026-08-22 at the new rate, silently restating months you already paid for. See what this change does to a real session, and why dated windows are the fix.

Provenance

Every value here carries a first-party source, and superseded prices are kept rather than overwritten. Windows before the index began are reconstructed from web archives and labelled as archived rather than claimed as first-party.

WindowSource
Input, 2026-07-09 to 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
Input, from 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
Output, 2026-07-09 to 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
Output, from 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
Cache read, 2026-07-09 to 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
Cache read, from 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
Cache write, 2026-07-09 to 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
Cache write, from 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
tier2_cache_read, 2026-07-09 to 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
tier2_cache_read, from 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
tier2_cache_write, 2026-07-09 to 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
tier2_cache_write, from 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
tier2_input, 2026-07-09 to 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
tier2_input, from 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
tier2_output, 2026-07-09 to 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
tier2_output, from 2026-08-22https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing

Related

Derived from the AI Price Index, last updated 2026-08-22. Licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse this with credit to the dataset page.