OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Sol to $4 and $20 until 21 November, and the same rate reached Bedrock
Input went from $5 to $4 and output from $30 to $20, promotional at least through 21 November. Amazon Bedrock matched it, and Activate credits can pay for it.
OpenAI cut the price of GPT-5.6 Sol on 21 August. A million input tokens went from $5 to $4 and a million output tokens from $30 to $20 — 20 percent off input and a third off output on its flagship model.
The second line of the notice matters more than the first. The rate is promotional, and OpenAI's pricing page puts a date on it: available at least through 21 November 2026. Three months is short next to the life of a credit award — AWS says Activate credits usually expire within one to two years — so a plan that spreads a year of Sol spend at $4 and $20 is wrong for every month after 21 November unless the promotion is extended.
The next question is whose invoice this lands on, and OpenAI's own API is one of the harder bills to cover with credits. There is no broad credit program: the Grove cohort is competitive and runs in fixed windows, and the partner-routed allocations are small enough that a serious workload burns through them in weeks.
On the same day, AWS passed the cut through to Amazon Bedrock, where Sol has been generally available since 9 July. Bedrock lists the same $4 and $20 with the same end date, and Amazon states that pricing matches OpenAI first-party rates and counts toward existing AWS commitments.
That is what changes for a founder. AWS's own page on Activate credits says the credits can be used for third-party models on Bedrock, and it names OpenAI among the providers. The same model at the same post-cut rate comes out of a credit balance rather than the bank account, provided the traffic runs through Bedrock instead of straight at OpenAI.
If you hold Activate credits and Sol is already in your stack, move that traffic to Bedrock and spend the promotional window on credits; then write 21 November into the burn model, because that is when the arithmetic goes back. What the program grants and who qualifies is on the AWS Activate card, and which credits pay for which models is in our guide to AI model credits.