Per the link someone else posted, the actual difference in $/task is not nearly so stark:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/releases/claude-opus-5-...

  Opus 5.5 Medium = $1.34
  GPT-6-Astra High = $1.76

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.

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.

A cheaper price has no value if I can’t use the thing I’m paying for.

The Claude lock-in simply disqualifies anthropic entirely (for my use).

> Even on a subscription you'll get considerably more usage out of Opus.

That's an incredibly bold assumption.

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.

news to me as well. i thought you were forced to use Codex if you wanted their subscription. I completely ignored it because of that. How do we do it?

Yes. Also, you get image generation included with the ChatGPT subscription, which is very nice for certain kinds of development.

Anthropic is absurdly vague about 3rd party harnesses for subscriptions, if you try to use anything besides Claude Code, you are likely at risk of getting banned, you can "do it", but are at their mercy if they decide to ban you. OpenAI gives their blessing to using oauth on any harness, you can make your own or use any of the popular public ones like opencode, pi, whatever exe.dev is that this guy mentioned.

So in simple terms, OpenAI doesn't restrict you to Codex, and gives their blessing to try whatever you want with their models(besides serving others with your subscription usage, that is still afaik against tos).

I read the page. It seems like a marginal improvement.

Let's wait for independent benchmarks at least