OpenAI slashes prices for GPT-5.6 Luna and Terra models
OpenAI has announced significant price cuts for its GPT-5.6 models, reducing the cost of GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% and GPT-5.6 Terra by 20%. Under the new pricing, Luna costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, while Terra is priced at $2.00 and $12.00 respectively. This drastic price reduction lowers the barrier to entry for developers deploying advanced AI applications, making frontier-level reasoning capabilities highly cost-effective. It also intensifies competition in the LLM market by forcing other providers to match these aggressive price-to-performance ratios. Despite the 80% price cut, GPT-5.6 Luna retains strong performance gains from additional reasoning capabilities. GPT-5.6 Terra remains positioned as the mid-tier option that balances intelligence and cost, competitive with the older GPT-5.5 generation.
## BACKGROUND
OpenAI released the GPT-5.6 model family in July 2026, structured into three distinct tiers: Sol (flagship), Terra (mid-tier), and Luna (fastest and most affordable). These models represent OpenAI's frontier-level intelligence, designed to scale across different performance and budget requirements. The pricing of LLMs is typically measured in millions of tokens, representing the units of text processed by the model.