OpenAI's price cut didn't win back Sol users because subscriptions, not per-token cost, decide, analysis says
A long post argues that GPT-6 Sol's half-price launch still didn't bring developers back, since what matters is subscription allowance rather than unit price, and DevDay is unlikely to turn it around.
DevDay probably won't win back the people Opus 5.5 pulled away. A bigger model wouldn't fix that anyway, because @OpenAI already made its model-and-price counter and it didn't work. About 90 minutes after Opus 5.5 launched on September 22, OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and Luna at half the price. Within days, @every, a team of heavy Codex users, was publishing that Opus 5.5 was pulling its converts back to Claude. The price cut missed because the developers who are switching (usually) don't pay per token. They pay a flat monthly subscription, and they feel the model as a weekly allowance inside Claude Code or Codex. That allowance is a business decision a company can change overnight without training anything. @AnthropicAI paired a model people actually enjoy working with to higher usage limits and a one-time free reset, and that's the combination that flipped the mood. The same crowd had moved the other way in July, when Opus 5 felt like a downgrade. So whether Tuesday flops with this crowd comes down to one unglamorous number: how much Astra and Sol work a $20 or $200 subscriber gets in Codex. Bel isn't coming to the rescue. It's a rumored base model that would still need months of training before it's a product, and OpenAI is in the middle of reviewing its research agents sending data where they shouldn't, while @sama has reportedly backed slowing capability growth. @thsottiaux, who leads Codex, teased products Astra helped build quickly, not a new model. The best-supported pricing rumor points the wrong way for this crowd. It's a $500-a-month Pro Max plan billed as "Fastest Work and Codex," which sells more speed and headroom for more money instead of more headroom for the same money. If that's the headline, the bearish call is right about Tuesday. Though, we must acknowledge how fragile Anthropic's side is, too. At maximum effort, @ArtificialAnlys measured Opus 5.5 using around 119,000 output tokens per task, far more than its rivals, and Every's testers said it burned through whole weekly allowances (I haven't been able to achieve this yet, so I am happy so far). Anthropic is being generous with a model that spends heavily, so every user who moves over makes that generosity more expensive to keep up. Anthropic has tightened limits on its heaviest users before. That means the next swing in loyalty is more likely to come from a quiet change to someone's usage limits than from a keynote.
This post quotes another post: x.com/scottstts/status/2104116595211538477