OpenAI DevDay: GPT-6.1 Sol nears Astra at one fifth of the price, but speed costs more
OpenAI's cheaper GPT-6.1 Sol comes close to Astra on coding and work tasks, while the faster Astra Ultrafast tier sits behind the new $500 Pro plan.
At DevDay in San Francisco on September 29, OpenAI announced more than 20 updates. RuntimeWire's rundown puts two of them side by side: a cheaper model that gets close to the flagship, and a faster tier that costs more.
GPT-6.1 Sol
GPT-6.1 Sol upgrades GPT-6 Sol. OpenAI says it approaches Astra's performance on coding, computer use and professional tasks at one fifth of Astra's standard input and output token prices. The published API prices are $2 per million input tokens, $0.10 for cached input and $10 per million output tokens. The model is available as `gpt-6.1-sol` in the API and in ChatGPT Work and Codex for Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu users, but not yet in ordinary Chat.
Astra Ultrafast
Ultrafast is a faster inference tier for GPT-6 Astra. OpenAI's recap says up to eight times faster token generation in Codex and up to six times in the API. It is priced at six times the standard rate, according to the keynote. It launches in the API and in ChatGPT Work and Codex on the Pro 500 and Enterprise plans. A Sol Ultrafast version is coming soon. RuntimeWire notes these are generation speeds, so total task time also depends on tools and other work.
The plans
The new Pro 500 plan costs $500 a month, includes Astra Ultrafast and offers an allowance OpenAI describes as 25 times Plus usage. OpenAI reopened the $200 Pro tier to new subscribers, but with a lower allowance. Existing subscribers keep the earlier allowance through October 29 and then move to the reduced one at the same price.
Other launches
The same keynote introduced Dots, always-on agents, as well as a managed Agents API, Codex cloud environments, a Decisions API in limited preview, ChatGPT Space for team work, and an OpenAI Marketplace with 32 launch partners.
Why it matters
OpenAI is splitting its lineup by what you value: price per token, or time to finish. For heavy users the choice between Sol and Astra Ultrafast becomes a real budgeting decision, and the top plan now costs more than twice the old Pro.
Dany's take
Cheaper brains, pricier speed. For most developers Sol at one fifth of the price is the story, since it is close enough to Astra for many jobs. Speed matters when a human waits on an agent, and then it is worth paying for. Run the same task on both and measure cost and time before you commit.
Source: RuntimeWire, Everything OpenAI announced at the DevDay 2026 keynote
Source: runtimewire.com