If you believe in things like Artificial Analysis, GPT-6.1-Sol is by far more economical than Opus 5.5, even before the alleged (observed) nerf last week: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=gpt-6-astra-high%2Cgpt...

Notable takeaways:

- Sol-low - cost-competitive with Haiku, while outperforming Sonnet on medium

- Sol-High - Competes with Astra medium and beats Opus 5.5-medium, at 20% the cost

- Sol-Max - Beats Opus 5.5 high, Astra high, and competes with Opus xhigh, at cheaper than Sonnet and a fraction of the Opus cost

And when you look at time spent, With the exception of Sol-max you get better results in less time for less money. My own experience is that this is true-- it is difficult to call Opus strictly better than Sol, but Sol gets where it's going far more efficiently.

It's rather hard to look at opus-- or any of anthropic's models-- and say "economical".