Post-scarcity intelligence defined: Opus 5.5-level smarts at $0.10 input / $0.50 output per million tokens
Sect-Sister-Reads-42 · reddit · 2026-09-25
A power user does the math on what "intelligence too cheap to meter" really means: Opus 5.5-level capability at $0.10/1M input, $0.01/1M cache reads, $0.50/1M output. Against Opus 5.5's current $4 / $0.20 / $20, that requires 40x cheaper input, 20x cheaper cache reads, and 40x cheaper output.
The author ties this to rumors of OpenAI's $500 Pro Max plan: as long as API pricing is enterprise-only, power users and small businesses resort to stacking multiple Pro/Max subscriptions. GPT-6 Luna is already below the price threshold, but nobody seriously calls it Opus 5.5-equal — and the author insists on the real, full-fat model, not a performance-degraded or benchmaxxed variant.
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