On July 30, 2026, OpenAI cut prices across the GPT-5.6 family. Terra dropped 20% to $2/M input and $12/M output, and Luna fell to just $0.20/$1.20 — making it one of the cheapest flagship-tier APIs in the market. Many comparison guides still list the old rates. Here is the current rate card.
The New GPT-5.6 Rate Card (as of August 2026)
| Model | Input $/M | Output $/M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-5.6 Sol | $5.00 | $30.00 | 1.05M |
| GPT-5.6 Terra | $2.00 | $12.00 | 1.05M |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | $0.20 | $1.20 | 1.05M |
What Changed and Why
Terra’s cut (from $2.50) targets the mid-tier market where Claude Sonnet 5 and Gemini 3.5 Pro compete. Luna’s dramatic drop (from $1/$6) makes OpenAI competitive with DeepSeek V4 Flash ($0.14/$0.28) and Qwen 3.7 Flash ($0.03/$0.13) on raw price while keeping the GPT ecosystem: structured outputs, tool calling, and 1M-token context.
Impact on Real Workloads
A chatbot doing 100K requests/day with 2K input / 500 output tokens on Luna now costs roughly $0.10/day in input and $0.06/day in output — under $5/month at scale. Production teams that left OpenAI on cost should re-run their math with the new rates.
Who Benefits Most
High-volume extraction, classification, summarization, and long-context RAG pipelines. Terra at $2/$12 is also the cheapest mid-tier option with native reasoning settings. Flagship pricing (Sol) is unchanged at $5/$30.
Bottom Line
Verify pricing before choosing providers — the July 30 cuts changed the competitive math. Full provider comparisons in our AI Model Comparison 2026.
