Plus users weigh Sol against expensive Astra for everyday coding
The author says GPT-6.1 Sol is slow but cheap and durable for daily coding and agent tasks, leaving Astra for cases that need maximum intelligence and easing Plus quota anxiety.
🚨 ChatGPT Plus users, OpenAI just gave you a fucking lifeline. GPT-6.1 Sol could be the model that finally lets you stop babysitting your usage. Astra is insanely capable and insanely expensive. But using a frontier model for every little coding task, research session or agent run makes no sense when you’re paying for a limited allowance. Sol changes that. It’s powerful enough to handle real work, cheap enough for OpenAI to offer at a much lower cost, and good enough that you don’t have to treat every prompt like it’s precious. Yes, Sol is Painfully slow as hell. But I’ll take a slower model I can actually lean on over a brilliant model I’m constantly afraid to use. Astra when I need maximum intelligence. Sol when I just need shit done. If OpenAI gets Sol’s speed under control, Codex users could have just received one of the biggest quality-of-life upgrades in the entire GPT-6 generation.