Flagship models have rarely being cheaper, and especially not on release day. Only a few cases of this really.

Notable exceptions are Deepseek 3.2 and Opus 4.5 and GPT 3.5 Turbo.

The price drops usually are the form of flash and mini models being really cheap and fast. Like when we got o4 mini or 2.0 flash which was a particularly significant one.

That's not true.

    > Notable exceptions are Deepseek 3.2 and Opus 4.5 and GPT 3.5 Turbo.

And GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, and GPT-5. Almost every OpenAI release got cheaper on a per-input-token basis.

Gemini 3 Pro Preview also got more expensive than 2.5 Pro.

2.5 Pro: $1.25 input, $10 output (million tokens)

3 Pro Preview: $2 input, $12 output (million tokens)

Literally no difference in productivity from a free/ <0.50c output OpenRouter model. All these > $1.00+ per mm output are literal scams. No added value to the world.

5.1 Pro is great

I struggle to see where Pro is better than 5.x with Thinking. Actually prefer the latter.

Many problems where latter spins its wheel and Pro gets it in one go, for me. You need to give Pro full files as context and you need to fit within its ~60k (I forget exactly) silent context window if using via ChatGPT. Don't have it make edits directly, have it give the execution plan back to Codex

Getting more expensive has been the trend for the closed weights frontier models. See Gemini 3 Pro vs 2.5 Pro. Also see Gemini 2.5 Flash vs 2.0 Flash. The only thing that got cheaper recently was Opus 4.5 vs Opus 4.

It also seems much more "smarter" though

Previous model's prices usually go down, but their flagship has always been the most expensive one.

Wtf, why would this be downvoted?

I'm adding context and what I stated is provably true.