Filling GPT-6 Astra's 1M-Token Context Window Costs $10 Per API Call

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OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra on September 3, 2026, offering a 1-million-token context window priced at $10 per million input tokens on the standard tier. Filling the entire context window in a single API call therefore costs roughly $10 in input costs alone, with output adding only a few cents. At scale, sending 1,000 fully loaded requests per day would amount to approximately $10,000 daily, or around $300,000 per month. By contrast, a retrieval-augmented approach sending around 8,000 tokens per request reduces that same daily cost to roughly $80. Beyond cost, retrieval also offers advantages in latency, relevance inspection, and the ability to cite specific source passages.

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