The AI inference price ladder printed its first durable rungs this week. Three models, three price points, and one expiration date.

Start at the bottom: Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash launched September 2 at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens. That's introductory pricing, and Google published the reset date: it doubles to $1.50/$7.50 on January 1, 2027. This is the third Flash model Google has shipped in six weeks, and on raw price per token it currently undercuts everything in the mid-tier. For a solo builder running inference-heavy workloads, $0.75 is the number that matters right now. The January deadline is actually useful — it gives you exactly four months to run the experiment, decide whether Flash fits, and lock in your stack before the rate resets.

One rung up: Anthropic confirmed on August 11 that Claude Sonnet 5's introductory rate of $2/$10 per million input/output tokens is now permanent. The scheduled September 1 increase to $3/$15 is cancelled. Opus 5 stays at $5/$25, Haiku 4.5 at $1/$5. Sonnet 5 is now the clearest stable anchor in the mid-tier — capable enough for production, cheap enough for real usage volume, and no longer a line item you have to revisit in your budget.

At the top: GPT-6 Astra launched September 3–4 at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, matching Claude Fable 5.1 pricing exactly. Sam Altman apologized for a messy rollout that left paying Plus, Business, Pro, and Enterprise users without promised access for hours after the announcement — early GPT-6 growing pains, the kind that follow any aggressive shipping timeline. The frontier tier has settled on a de facto rate card: $10 in, $50 out. Two vendors, same price. Whether Astra's capability premium over Sonnet 5 justifies five times the per-token cost is now the decision every builder needs to make for their own stack, with actual numbers on the table.

The So-What for someone working alone: you now have three real tiers with published rates. Gemini Flash at $0.75 is the experimental budget tier — cheap enough to absorb learning costs, but set an alarm for December 31. Sonnet 5 at $2 is the build tier — the price won't move on you. The $10/$50 frontier is available from two vendors, and competition between them means neither can get comfortable.

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