[manquer]

> but GPT-5.5 has closed that gap at a time when a lot of Anthropic customers are looking for cheaper alternatives.

GPT-5.5 is a bit more expensive than Opus ? Current list prices

  | Model      | Input   | Output   |
  | GPT-5.5    | $5/MTok | $30/MTok |
  | Opus 4.8/7 | $5/MTok | $25/MTok |

Deepseek perhaps would be the top threat on a pure price/performance metric for either of them. It doesn't look like OAI is going for the value play .

[gruez]

Comparing $/MTokfor models makes as much sense as comparing $/ghz for CPUs. Models have different tokenizers and take varying number of "thinking" to get to a solution. A far better proxy is how much it takes to do a run, which takes all of that into account. Such metrics are much harder to gather, but once source claims $3357 for gpt-5.5 vs $4686 for opus, the opposite of your conclusion.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/?cost=intelligence-vs-cost

[manquer]

There is no conclusion , I only stated the only objective fact to compare with that will not change for you to me.

Everything else is subjective to your setup, use case, configuration tuning and so forth.

More importantly bean-counters and decision makers at even 150+ seat orgs are looking at pricing sheets and enterprise contracts not how it performs for some team in a specific harness today to make million dollar annual contracts. It is not common for procurement teams to do commission the level of detailed analysis or large scale pilots that will actually hold for the duration of contract.

That doesn't mean that GPT-5.5 is selling less than Claude at all, just that cost is not the primary driver if list price is not cheaper, there is reason these are published in the same format by every vendor, because the common metric is how finance likes to compare with.

[Spartan-S63]

Most variants of GPT-5.5 are less chatty and token-intensive than Opus 4.8/4.7, so despite the output token price being higher, it generates fewer tokens, so the net cost is lower.

Per-token pricing is totally sensible from the provider-perspective on mapping COGS to revenue, but for a consumer, different models will produce more or less tokens, meaning the cost calculation is multi-dimensional.

[manquer]

You can configure model to be terse/concise with output style ? There are plenty of popular projects like https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman which do it for you even.

Input/Cache/Output ratios are use case and configuration dependent . Any benefits in one model can usually be roughly to another with configuration tuning, and discussions devolve into subjective experience.

Pricing sheet is the objective way to compare cost.