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PricesCompare → GPT-5.6 Sol vs GPT-5.6 Terra

GPT-5.6 Sol vs GPT-5.6 Terra: API cost compared

GPT-5.6 Sol lists at $2.500 in / $15.00 out per 1M tokens. GPT-5.6 Terra lists at $1.000 in / $6.000. Sticker price only tells you so much — below is what each actually costs across eight production workloads.

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Cheaper on more workloads
GPT-5.6 Terra
wins 8 of 8
Blended rate gap
2.5x
at 3:1 in:out

Side by side

GPT-5.6 SolGPT-5.6 Terra
ProviderOpenAIOpenAI
Input per 1M$2.500$1.000
Output per 1M$15.00$6.000
Cached input per 1M$0.250$0.100
Context window400k400k
Blended per 1M (3:1)$5.625$2.250

Monthly cost by workload

Caching applied at each workload's typical hit rate. This is where the two models actually separate.

WorkloadGPT-5.6 SolGPT-5.6 TerraCheaperDifference
Customer support chatbot$366.00$146.40GPT-5.6 Terra$219.60 (60%)
RAG document Q&A$490.00$196.00GPT-5.6 Terra$294.00 (60%)
Coding agent$261.25$104.50GPT-5.6 Terra$156.75 (60%)
Bulk summarization$3,465$1,386GPT-5.6 Terra$2,079 (60%)
Structured data extraction$4,675$1,870GPT-5.6 Terra$2,805 (60%)
Long-form content generation$636.50$254.60GPT-5.6 Terra$381.90 (60%)
Email triage agent$1,081$432.50GPT-5.6 Terra$648.75 (60%)
Translation pipeline$4,112$1,645GPT-5.6 Terra$2,467 (60%)
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How to read this

GPT-5.6 Terra is cheaper on the majority of these workloads, but "majority" is not the decision. The output:input price ratio is 6.0 for GPT-5.6 Sol and 6.0 for GPT-5.6 Terra. If your traffic is output-heavy — long-form drafting, translation — the model with the lower output price wins regardless of what the input price suggests. If you are input-heavy — RAG, bulk summarization, agents re-reading a codebase — the cached input rate matters more than either headline number.

Cost is also not the only axis. This site does not benchmark quality, latency, or rate limits, and a model that is 3x cheaper but needs two attempts per task is not cheaper. Use these numbers to size a bill, then validate on your own evals.

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