Evidence update · blog August 25, read directly on October 18

OpenRouter says Luna alone rose 13.8x; data is self-reported

OpenRouter's official blog says the 13.8x rise in daily token usage during the August discount belongs to GPT-5.6 Luna alone. Terra grew 5.6x, and the undiscounted Sol grew 1.1x over the same period. In the same promotion window, the deeper a model's discount, the more its usage rose, and Sol, with no discount, barely moved. OpenRouter is a routing platform that dispatches requests to many model providers. The September 1 issue, based on an OpenRouter post from August 28, wrote that token usage for two GPT-5.6 variants, Terra and Luna, grew 13.8x while both were "heavily discounted" on the platform. The blog says the 13.8x belongs to Luna alone: "Daily Terra token usage rose 5.6x during the discount window, while daily Luna token usage jumped 13.8x. The Sol model, which remained a list price, saw only a gentle bump of 1.1x over the same period" (OpenRouter blog, 2026-08-25).

Concept illustration: at top centre, a pale grey sign shows a blue and pink angle-bracket symbol next to the lettering OPENROUTER, and below it a long table on thin black legs holds three open laptops with their lids facing the viewer: a red-orange one on the left lettered GPT-5.6 LUNA with a pale pink circle behind it, then two black ones lettered GPT-5.6 TERRA and GPT-5.6 SOL. To the right of the table stands a person with long dark hair in a long grey-brown coat over black clothes and white sneakers, wearing a lanyard badge and holding a book at their side.

The blog also gives the discount sizes the September 1 issue lacked: OpenRouter first cut prices by half, then OpenAI cut its own list prices on July 30, Luna by 80% and Terra by 20%, and the two stacked. By SecondSource's conversion, Luna's effective price was about a tenth of the original with 13.8x usage, and Terra's about four-tenths with 5.6x. The rough log elasticity over the promotion window is about −1.1 for Luna and about −1.9 for Terra (our calculation, not OpenRouter's measure). The more negative the number, the more usage responds to a price cut. Sol's 1.1x is the only control. The blog has no sentence on revenue or gross margin. The multiples don't net out organic growth, the window includes one-off arbitrage, and they can't be extended into a long-run demand curve; the figures are one platform's self-report. How we checked →

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 18, 2026, alongside 14 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "OpenRouter says Luna alone rose 13.8x; data is self-reported." https://secondsource.io/en/research/2026-10-18-1/. Accessed access date.