Claude Opus 5.5 vs GPT-6 Astra: why price per token may mislead coding cost
darsh_trivedi · reddit · 2026-10-11
The author compares pricing: Opus 5.5 costs $4/M input and $20/M output, while Astra runs $10/M input and $50/M output — on paper Opus is the clear pick. But he argues price per token is the wrong metric for coding; what matters is total usage burned before a task is actually done, including tokens spent exploring files, retries and follow-up prompts, rework after bad edits, context retention in long sessions, and how much caching helps. Working mostly on existing HTML/CSS/JS/PHP codebases, he values iterative edits and debugging over one-shot benchmarks. He also notes comparisons are meaningless without matching reasoning levels (e.g. Opus Medium vs Astra xHigh), and asks real users of both which they'd keep.
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