token pricing

OpenAI's $1 government pilot ends September 30. Its successor is a $0 licence and 50% off metered tokens, which agencies must fund against a ceiling on a stopgap budget while the Claude and Gemini deals expire the same day.

GitHub's HydraFusion router bills every model it invokes at standard rates, and two of its three patterns fire two or three models per turn. The measured saving swings from 36% to 67% across just three benchmarks — and the one that looks most like enterprise work saved least.

Anthropic cut Claude Fable 5.1 cache reads 75% to $0.25/MTok, half of Opus 5's rate on a model with twice the base input price. But Opus 5 stays cheaper until cache reads pass a third of your bill, and Anthropic's own savings ceiling of 45% falls short of the 50% crossover.

OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Sol to $4/$20 per million tokens but guarantees the rate only "at least through November 21, 2026," with no successor published. The cut was asymmetric, so no two workloads saved the same amount — and the reversion is +50% on output, not +33%.