GPT-5.6 Sol costs $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, GPT-5.6 Terra costs $2.50 and $15, and GPT-5.6 Luna costs $1 and $6
and bigger departureJason Hiner /The Deep View:GPT-5.6 opens ChatGPT's agentic era with a bangMartin Peers /The Information:Meta Finds a New Way to Spend a Fortune on AI
OpenAI
Context & Ripple Effects
OpenAI’s recent GPT-5 pricing moved upward from GPT-5.4’s $2.50/$15 input-output rates to GPT-5.5’s $5/$30. GPT-5.6 keeps those two price points in Sol and Terra while adding Luna at $1/$6.
The tiering arrives as ChatGPT’s reported market share had fallen to 46.4% by the end of May. Sol also adds an Ultra mode using subagents for complex workflows, tying the price ladder to differing levels of agentic capability.
First-order effects
OpenAI gives API buyers three GPT-5.6 cost/performance entry points: Luna at $1/$6, Terra at $2.50/$15, and Sol at $5/$30 per million input/output tokens.
Existing users of the $5/$30 and $2.50/$15 price bands can map to Sol and Terra without a listed rate increase, while lower-budget workloads gain a GPT-5.6 option in Luna.
Second-order effects
Developers can segment workloads more deliberately—using Luna for cost-sensitive volume and reserving Sol, including its subagent-enabled Ultra mode, for more complex tasks—rather than applying one GPT-5.6 price level across applications.
The $1/$6 Luna tier puts pressure on competing model providers to distinguish their own lower-cost offerings on either pricing or capability, particularly for customers comparing high-volume token usage.
Third-order effects
If OpenAI sustains this structure, frontier-model monetization may increasingly resemble a capability ladder: lower-priced variants broaden adoption while premium tiers capture agentic and reasoning-intensive work.
The pattern also suggests that headline per-token prices alone will be less informative for buyers; workload routing across model tiers may become a central determinant of application economics.
The trend: This is one data point in the shift from single flagship-model pricing toward tiered portfolios designed to price AI workloads by capability and complexity.
GPT-5.6 is here. Sol is an incredible model, and Terra/Luna provide great performance at lower price. Great at coding, knowledge work, cybersecurity, and science with fewer tokens and at lower cost. https://openai.com/...
Most of us at OpenAI have been using Codex for multi-step knowledge work. It's changed how I think about what's possible when you give AI a clear outcome …
Today, GPT-5.6 is generally available across ChatGPT, Codex, the OpenAI API, and Amazon Bedrock. — The family includes: — ☀️ Sol — our flagship model …
1/ OpenAI's 5.6 Sol was released publicly today. AI Security Institute tested it before release and you can see contributions summarised in OpenAI's system card. …
there's no chat/instant — all of these are just different sizes of thinking models. i guess it's decided then, everything is agents now [embedded post]