Everyone's excited about OpenAI's new flagship. Here's what the hype skips: you can get the same OpenAI-compatible API — with reasoning, agents, and long context — at up to 20× less, on 100% renewable energy, with zero data retention.
Start free — get $1 credit See pricing| Ethical AI | GPT-6 Astra | |
|---|---|---|
| API surface | OpenAI-compatible | OpenAI-compatible |
| Input / 1M tokens | $0.66 – $2.50 | $10.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $0.66 – $8.00 | $50.00 |
| Long context | 256K+ on fleet traffic | 1.05M (2× surcharge >272K) |
| Energy | 100% renewable (hydro/geothermal) | Undisclosed |
| Data retention | Zero — nothing stored | Stored per OpenAI policy |
| Audit headers | Carbon + privacy on every response | None |
| Weights | Open models, self-hostable | Closed |
| Best for | Daily agent + app workloads | Hardest one-off frontier tasks |
Honest read — Astra is genuinely better at a narrow slice: autonomous computer use, terminal agentic coding, and frontier math. If that's your workload, you know it. It also costs $50/M output and only runs in OpenAI's cloud.
For chat, agents, tool calls, code, and everyday app workloads, independent benchmarks show Astra is no better than the prior generation — just 2.5× the price. That's where we live:
/v1/chat/completions — swap your base URL, donePrices as of Sep 2026. Astra pricing per OpenAI's public API docs. Our models route to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, DeepSeek V4 Pro, and Gemini 3.8 Flash. "20× cheaper" = our $0.66–$2.50 output vs Astra's $50.00.