Home / GPT-6 Sol vs Astra Cost
Astra is the top GPT-6 tier — and it costs exactly 5× Sol on every published rate. The per-request difference looks small ($0.47); the monthly difference usually doesn't. Enter your workload below.
✓ Last verified: September 26, 2026 · Manually verifiedPick a model, set your workload, and watch both models update side by side. Prices come from the same data layer as every calculator on this site — never hard-coded per page.
Source: OpenAI official pricing. Per 1M tokens, USD, short-context Standard tier — the rates the calculator above uses.
| Model | Input / 1M | Cached input / 1M | Output / 1M |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-6 Sol | $2.00 | $0.20 | $10.00 |
| GPT-6 Astra | $10.00 | $1.00 | $50.00 |
| Astra ÷ Sol | 5× | 5× | 5× |
Long-context rates preserve the exact 5× ratio: Sol $4.00 / $0.40 / $15.00, Astra $20.00 / $2.00 / $75.00 per 1M. Details on the methodology page.
Same concrete workload — 30,000 input + 8,000 output tokens per request, 20,000 requests/month, 40% cached input, Standard tier:
| Per request | Per day | Per month | Per year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-6 Sol | $0.11840 | $78.93 | $2,368.00 | $28,416.00 |
| GPT-6 Astra | $0.59200 | $394.67 | $11,840.00 | $142,080.00 |
| Difference | $0.47360 | $315.73 | $9,472.00 | $113,664.00 |
Astra costs $9,472 more per month on this workload. The per-request gap ($0.4736) is easy to dismiss — until volume multiplies it. At 100,000 requests/month the gap is $47,360/month; at a million requests/month it reaches $473,600/month. The 5× ratio never changes; only your traffic decides how much it hurts.
Both models discount cached input to 0.1× the standard rate, so caching cuts both bills by the same percentage and never changes the ranking.
On the example workload (40% cached input): Sol drops from $2,800.00 to $2,368.00/month (saves $432.00, −15.4%); Astra drops from $14,000.00 to $11,840.00/month (saves $2,160.00, −15.4%). Astra's cache savings are five times as large in dollars — which is exactly why heavy prompt-caching architectures narrow the absolute premium of the top tier, even though the 5× ratio is untouched.
For the example workload the split is identical on both models — 67.6% output, 32.4% input — because the 5× scaling is uniform across all three rates. The practical reading: output tokens drive two-thirds of this bill, and the output-rate gap ($50 vs $10 per 1M) is where Astra's premium concentrates. Every extra 1,000 output tokens costs $0.01 on Sol vs $0.05 on Astra. If your workload generates long outputs (code, documents, multi-step agent traces), model the output side first — that's the line item that decides the budget.
Math only, no verdicts. This page compares cost arithmetic. It does not claim Sol or Astra is "better" — quality, latency, and reliability are separate decisions we don't measure. The honest question this page answers is narrower: given your token mix, how many dollars does the 5× cost?
Exactly 5× on every published rate: input $10.00 vs $2.00, cached input $1.00 vs $0.20, output $50.00 vs $10.00 per 1M tokens (short-context Standard rates, verified September 26, 2026). Because the ratio is uniform, the 5× holds for any workload mix.
It scales linearly with volume. On our example coding-agent workload the gap is $9,472/month; at 100,000 requests/month it would be $47,360/month. The per-request difference is $0.4736, which looks small until you multiply it by real traffic.
No. Both models discount cached input to 0.1× the standard rate, so caching cuts both bills by the same percentage (15.4% in our example). Astra saves more absolute dollars ($2,160/month vs $432 at 40% cache) because its base price is higher, but Sol costs one-fifth as much regardless.
They halve both bills (0.5× multiplier) without touching the 5× ratio. On the example workload the monthly gap drops from $9,472 to $4,736 — still 5×, just smaller dollars.
Yes. Long-context rates are Sol $4.00/$0.40/$15.00 and Astra $20.00/$2.00/$75.00 per 1M — exactly 5× on input and cached input, 5× on output ($75 vs $15). Our calculator uses short-context rates; treat the estimate as a lower bound for prompts routinely above roughly 200K tokens.
No — this page compares cost arithmetic only. Whether the 5× premium is worth it depends on quality, latency, and reliability requirements we do not measure here. Price your actual token mix above, then weigh the result against your own evaluations.
Independence disclosure: this is an independent cost-estimation tool. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Prices are a snapshot last verified September 26, 2026 and may be outdated — always confirm on the provider's official pricing page before making decisions.