Same $10/$50 price tag, very different bills: Astra vs Fable 5.1 token efficiency and cache economics
nearsync43 · reddit · 2026-09-08
A Reddit analysis compares Astra and Fable 5.1, both priced at $10/M input and $50/M output, showing real costs diverge sharply.
- Astra finishes tasks with less than half the tokens of Fable 5.1, winning long single tasks on cost.
- Fable 5.1 charges $0.25/M cache reads vs Astra's $1.00/M — a 4x gap that favors Fable for retrieval and long-document workloads re-reading large cached contexts.
- Capability-wise, Astra leads computer use, math and security (100% on ExploitBench, 72.6% on OSWorld 2.0, reportedly half the hallucinations); Fable 5.1 tops independent intelligence and coding-agent indexes plus Humanity's Last Exam.
- The author's broader point: most production LLM spend goes to tasks that never needed a frontier model.
Related event: Same Intelligence, Half the Cost: Astra Beats Fable 5.1 on Per-Task Pricing(2 posts)→
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