I think gpt 5.6 family also dropped pricing but didn't give any more usage for the subscriptions. Maybe it's a way to silently lower the value given to subscriptions while keeping API pricing competitive
25% more usage sounds about right given the other token costs are down about 20%? I don't think cache read is a big portion of the overall cost.
> I don't think cache read is a big portion of the overall cost.
For long running tasks it is. That's what made Deepseek so cheap.
Yeah, flash models, DeepSeek, MiMo, GLM, I love those things. For simple tasks like a daily routine shit, just setting up stuff and then doing the hard stuff in Claude/Codex, that's a reasonable approach for someone like me, a "gentleman code farmer", lol. And even lower tier stuff, I have the local models taking care of.
Now that Jev is out I can finally have a true AI sysadmins managing my "cloud in the basement" homelab at the cost of electricity, which is not cheap btw
Anything with long context quickly gets dominated by cache reads. Especially for interactive sessions I’ve got cache read % between 95% and 98%.
In my mix it's usually 98% or 99% at which point Fable 5.1 was pretty close to the same cost as Opus 5 due to the cheaper cached read. I've seen similar numbers for other people with long-running tasks running experiment loops and than sort of thing.