Pricing Articles
17 articles across AI Catchup's news, guides, tutorials, and comparisons.
All Pricing articles
Anthropic Releases Claude Haiku 5.5, Its Fastest Model and First Haiku With Effort Levels
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026, its fastest model to date and the first Haiku with effort levels. It scores 72.4% on OSWorld 2.1 against Haiku 4.5's 15.7%, and costs $0.10 per million input and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens, 90% less than Haiku 4.5.
ChatGPT Pro 500 Launches at $500 With 25x Plus Usage and Astra Ultrafast, While Pro 200 Drops to 10x
OpenAI's Pro 500 costs $500 a month for 25 times ChatGPT Plus usage plus Ultrafast, which now covers GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol and uses included limits at 8x the Standard rate. Astra Ultrafast generates tokens up to 8x faster in Codex. Pro 200 reopens; Sottiaux and The New Stack say it falls from 20x to 10x Plus.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 Launches With Lower Task Costs and Cursor Support
Anthropic introduced Claude Sonnet 5.5 on September 28 with model ID `claude-sonnet-5-5`. It keeps Sonnet 5's $2 input and $10 output price per million tokens; Anthropic reports output generation more than 30% faster and up to 30% lower cost per task. Cursor lists the model in Settings > Models. Cache reads dropped to $0.10 per million tokens on October 7.
GPT-6.1 Sol: Astra-Level Coding at a Fifth of the Price, With Cost at Every Effort Level
OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol on September 29, 2026, at $2 input and $10 output per million tokens, a fifth of GPT-6 Astra's price, with cached input at $0.10. On OpenAI's charts it edges past Astra's best DeepSWE score at high effort and trails Astra by 2.1 points on OSWorld offline. The API model ID is gpt-6.1-sol.
Anthropic Resumes Billing for Claude Refusals Before Output in Three Safeguard Categories
Anthropic resumed billing for Claude requests refused before any output when its safeguards classify them as biology, frontier LLM development, or reasoning extraction. The charge uses the model's normal rates across platforms. Other pre-output refusals remain unbilled, but still count against rate limits.
Claude Opus 5.5: Fable 5.1-Level Scores at $4 and $20, With Benchmarks, Effort Costs, and Migration Guide
Claude Opus 5.5, released September 22, 2026, beats Claude Fable 5.1 on every benchmark Anthropic published and costs $4 and $20 per million tokens, 60% less than Fable 5.1. It scores 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 against 57.9% for GPT-6 Astra. Thinking is always on, the default effort is medium, and four API changes can break Opus 5 code.
GPT-6 Sol and Luna: Half the Price of GPT-5.6, With Benchmarks and Cost at Every Effort Level
OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna on September 22, 2026, at $2 and $10 and $0.10 and $0.50 per million tokens, half the price of GPT-5.6. Luna scores 66.6% on DeepSWE for about $0.22 a task. Since October 7 the pair has been rolling out as ChatGPT's Chat models, and GPT-6.1 Sol has succeeded Sol at the same price.
OpenAI Lists New ChatGPT Voice in Desktop Pricing for Work and Codex
OpenAI's current Codex pricing documentation lists Voice in Desktop at $0.05 per connected minute and 1.25 credits per minute for credit-based Business, Edu, and Enterprise workspaces. OpenAI Developers amplified a post describing the change as an approximately 60% price reduction for Voice in Work and Codex; the documentation confirms the current rates but does not provide a prior-rate comparison.
Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1: Same Price, Cheaper Cache Reads, Fewer Safeguard Interventions
Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 on September 1, 2026 as claude-fable-5-1 at $10 per million input and $50 per million output tokens, with cache reads cut 75% to $0.25 per million. Anthropic estimates typical workloads cost about 25% less than Fable 5. Claude Mythos 5.1 is the same model with fewer cyber and life-science safeguards, limited to vetted US organizations.
Anthropic Opens a Claude Team Plan for Scientists With Free Standard Seats
Anthropic opened a Claude Team plan for scientists on August 27, 2026. Verified principal investigators at eligible academic and nonprofit institutions can apply for free Standard seats or Premium seats at $15 per user per month for 12 months, with Claude Science, Claude Code, Cowork, shared projects, and administration included.
ChatGPT Business Premium Seats Are Live: 5x More Usage and No Five-Hour Limit
OpenAI has made Premium seats available on ChatGPT Business. Premium seats cost $100 per user per month when billed annually or $125 monthly, provide 5x more usage than Standard seats, remove the five-hour usage limit, and can be mixed with Standard seats in one workspace.
Grok 4.6 Launched in Cursor With a One-Week 2x Usage Window, Now Ended
SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6 on August 12, 2026, focused on long-running agents and visual work. Its first-week 2x included-usage offer in Cursor and Grok Build has ended, and Grok 4.7 succeeded it on September 21 at the same price. Grok 4.6 API pricing starts at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.
OpenAI Cuts GPT-5.6 Prices and Renames Priority Processing to Fast Mode
OpenAI reduced GPT-5.6 Luna pricing by 80% and Terra by 20%, then announced temporary GPT-5.6 Sol API and credit pricing relief for the next three months. OpenAI also renamed Priority processing to Fast mode and updated its pricing guidance for the GPT-5.6 family.
Cursor Launches Cursor Start: ₹649/Month Plan for Developers in India
Cursor Start is an India-only plan at ₹649 per month, tax inclusive, billed monthly in INR. As of September 26, 2026, Cursor's help docs say it covers Grok 4.7, Grok 4.6, Grok 4.5, and Composer 2.5 in non-fast mode, with the Grok models at a fixed medium effort level, and excludes third-party models and on-demand spend, and pauses AI features when the monthly pool runs out.
Cursor Doubles Usage Limits on All Individual and Teams Plans
Cursor doubled the included usage pool for its own models, and staff confirmed in writing that it is permanent: 'The doubled pool stays.' As of October 9, 2026, the pool covers four models: Grok 4.7, Grok 4.6, Grok 4.5, and Composer 2.5. What expired on July 21, 2026 was a separate 50 percent launch discount on Grok 4.5.
Google Ships Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber
Google released three Gemini models on July 21, 2026: Gemini 3.6 Flash, a coding and knowledge-work workhorse at $1.50/$7.50 per million tokens that uses 17% fewer output tokens; Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, a 350 tokens-per-second model at $0.30/$2.50 for high-throughput agents; and Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, a security-specialized model piloted with governments and trusted partners.
Cursor Composer 2.5: Better Long-Running Agent Work, Standard vs Fast Pricing, and Composer 2 Retired
Composer 2.5 is Cursor's own agentic coding model and, as of October 2026, the only Composer model Cursor lists: Composer 2 is retired, and SDK requests for it reroute to Composer 2.5. Cursor says 2.5 is better at long-running tasks and complex instructions. Standard costs $0.50/$2.50 per million tokens; Fast, the default, costs $3/$15.