I just checked, seems you are right. They had roughly a week with the lower pricing, then increased it, now decrease it again. Very odd. My testing was with the higher pricing and looking at AA, theirs seems to have been too.
Too many models now to remember specifics - I believe deepseek v4 did this and one of the gpt models (5? 5.1? 6?) did this if I recall correctly. I’m also fairly confident Google has had a few promotional periods on launch of the model, I seem to remember them starting the trend.