And that assumes Opus 5.5 Medium is actually equivalent to Astra High in all real-world usage/personal work loads, which isn't guaranteed as benchmarks saturate. The High vs. High comparison (probably not equivalent, but for reference):
Opus 5.5 High = $1.82
GPT-6-Astra High = $1.76
If Opus 5.5 Medium isn't equal/better for what you're working on vs. Astra High across the board, the price difference would narrow a bit more each time you had to switch to High.
So, if you're happy with Codex already it's not like Opus is now 1/2 the price and you'd be leaving a crazy amount of money/tokens on the table. Plus you have way more flexibility on the low end of the intelligence curve with GPT 5.6 Luna: Haiku (and Sonnet) can't touch that price/value ratio.
Once you get to roughly the 51+ Intelligence Index range, Opus 5.5 appears to define essentially the entire cost/performance frontier, from ~$1.34/task through ~$6/task.
Directly below this in the Cost per Intelligence Index Task table, the most efficient by far is Opus 5.5 Low.
In the end what matters is how much you pay for the task you want completed. And Astra will usually do that using less token and offer a better quality solution so in the end it might be cheaper.
This. I was fed up today with constantly correcting Opus for a specific task. So I finally decided to try Astra. It handled all of my prompts in one go.
yeah, Astra burned through 70% of my weekly usage in ~5hrs on a $100 plan. even fable doesn't run out that quickly for me. it's great, but it's on the same tier as fable for me - use it sparingly, only when really necessary.
