Same prompt, same footage: Astra costs 8x more than Opus 5.5
Running the same tool, footage and prompt twice, Opus 5.5 cost $19.82 and GPT-6 Astra cost $161.54, with no visible difference in the output.
Opus 5.5 just made GPT-6 Astra look like the most overpriced model in the room. Same tool. Same footage. Same prompt. Tesseract by Mirage ran both builds back to back, nothing else touched. Opus 5.5: $19.82. GPT-6 Astra: $161.54. Nobody could tell the two outputs apart without checking the invoice. No sharper detail, no cleaner motion, nothing that justified an extra $140. This is the part of the AI race nobody wants to say out loud. Model pricing has stopped tracking model quality. Increasingly you are paying for a name attached to the output, not for anything the video itself proves. https://x.com/trymirage/status/2102502794003677373/video/1