The Price of a Token

OpenAI launched GPT-6.1 Terra today at $1 per million input tokens, $5 for output and $0.05 for cached input. That is pretty similar to what happened with 6.1-Sol, since it is half of what GPT-5.6 Terra costs now, and the cached input rate is a fifth of what my piclaw pricing table recorded for it back in July. This is kind of interesting to me for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I have been tracking these numbers for months both at work and as I use my OpenAI subscription–my agents burn through a fair chunk of tokens, so anything that makes them much cheaper is noteworthy. Following the numbers In case you’re new here, piclaw keeps a dated pricing reference for its token chart, plus a set of finops snapshots with the provider pages they were taken from. Looking at the git history for a few model lines (USD per million tokens, input/output, then cache reads), the trend is pretty interesting: Line Earlier Now Claude Opus 4/4.1: $15/$75, $1.50 5.5: $4/$20, $0.20…