It's discounted if used via OpenRouter, not the official API.

That's weird.

Why is that weird?

How is that not weird?

Has OpenAI struck a deal with openrouter and that's why we're seeing preferred pricing?

Is openrouter taking a loss on sol API calls to grow adoption?

How temporary is the reduction in price?

Selling cheaper through what should be a minor third party, than through the first, party is super weird in commerce.

Maybe they (oai) want to pump their marketshare on openrouter lol

Any benefit of pumping marketshare on open router?

if I was going to IPO I'd want higher marketshare and openrouter is the most popular way to measure model usage (not saying it's the most accurate b/c it's not)

Doesn't seem like a smart business move.

You're literally encouraging someone else to come in and steal your customer base,

A surprising amount of companies sell exact the same product through different channels for different prices. A good example is Apple.

Multiple times a year, retailers here in Australia have co-ordinated sales on Apple products. Apple.com or their retail stores don't have these sales.

But they're clearly Apple-funded when competing retailers launch the same sales on the same days; and the margins aren't enough for retailers to take a loss.

Or it's "normal" market segmentation. OpenRouter users are more price sensitive in general, also a lot of enterprise users who can't switch easily are using the official API (or Bedrock or Azure) and you want to squeeze them as much as you can.

Literally all OEMs do this, if you go to Apple site you won't see any sales, but Amazon and other retailers will have stuff at 20% off regularly

This imbalance of exchange means that OpenAI is getting something from this deal. Question what is exactly.

Seems reasonably clear to me? Potentially bringing in more customers who use OpenRouter for trying out all the models with rapid switching, enticing them to use Sol. And anyone being routed on price will immediately be switched to OpenAI's servers instead.

It also seems to be providing a vastly better user experience - Azure has less than 99% uptime (Azure USA only has 87% uptime), latency of 20 - 30 seconds, and a mere 8 tokens per second. OpenAI is offering 32 tokens per second (4x faster), 4 seconds latency (5x faster), and all for half the price of what Microsoft is charging for a vastly inferior experience.

Data taken from this page:

https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.6-sol#providers

I think being able to A/B test price is invaluable for them. They can't cut prices by 50% and hike it again. By letting others slash the price, they can tell if it is worth it or not to do this officially.

They’re trying to compete with open weight models here. It’s a very different customer segment.

So the title is misleading, intentionally.

And it's not just on OpenRouter; Vercel offers the same:

https://vercel.com/changelog/gpt-5-6-sol-is-50-off-on-ai-gat...