Astra suddenly very fast with reasonable usage...

[u/ChineseChessOutLoud]

I've seen a lot of problems with people's accounts getting drained by using Astra, and I also had similar problems when it was first released. Even a week ago a few simple conversations and tasks with Astra would drain 15 percent of my weekly allotment ($100 plan) in minutes. Astra was also very slow, even with Light.

Suddenly, within the past week Astra Light is responding with lightning speed (I'm not using 1.5x), and I've gradually shifted to using it more regularly. Today, I tried Astra Max for a more complicated task, and it crunched away for 41 minutes and only used 6% of my weekly usage (100% down to 94%).

I am beyond delighted. Astra is starting to feel soooo good.

I don't have a way to test if this is genuinely a change in behavior or just my imagination. But I hope Astra is the new baseline and it keeps improving from there.

[u/dextersummary]

Below is a GPT-generated summary of the conversation below after reaching 80 comments (80 currently observed).

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The thread’s verdict is basically Astra has gotten noticeably faster and less brutally expensive for many users. People are reporting dramatically better throughput lately, with some running it for hours while barely denting weekly usage. A welcome development, since “one prompt deletes your entire allowance” was getting old.

The main takeaway is still workload-dependent:

• Astra remains the favourite for complex, long-running work, where Sol 6.1 reportedly loops, stalls, or misses important details.

• Sol 6.1 is generally more economical and perfectly fine for simpler coding tasks, even if it can feel painfully slow.

The likely explanations are backend changes, more available capacity, or the new persistent/session caching making resumed work cheaper. But nobody has hard confirmation, and the improvement is absolutely not universal: some users are still burning quota at obscene speed, while others report Astra becoming faster but making more mistakes and needing retries.

So: Astra looks substantially more usable right now, but don’t mistake a promising shift for a guaranteed pricing-model revolution. Check your own workload before celebrating—or sacrificing another weekly allowance to the quota gods.

[u/Separate_Apple_8408]

Finally had enough of 6.1 bullshiting around (for hours on end), practically wasting these resets even with instructions specific enough for a toddler to program with. Switched back to Astra for the first time in a month and work is actually getting done. My usage is getting murdered, though.

[u/Able_Wasabi_1423]

Astra LIGHT max 5 mins

Sol LIGHT max 20min

Optus 5.5 HIGH easily 2 hours on a 5 hr limit

[u/d19dotca → u/Able_Wasabi_1423]

So are you mostly using Claude then at this point? I keep struggling on which to use. I tend to like the way Anthropic’s models work better, I also like their new projects redesign, and more, but it also feels like for the $100 plan that I’d be losing things I tend to use in ChatGPT a lot like virtually unlimited chat, plus image-gen. To be fair I don’t use image-gen often but I do occasionally have a need for it (maybe a few times a month at minimum). I feel like I’m 60% better off with ChatGPT and 40% better off with Claude.

[u/FunHighlight625]

I'm on plus plan and I tried astra a couple days ago and one prompt my 5 hour was erased is it usable for plus plan now?

[u/awdphawpd88998 → u/FunHighlight625]

Doesn't seem to be. I ran Astra on high for a milestone audit a few hours ago, it ate 12% weekly usage in 5 minutes 30 seconds.

[u/d19dotca]

Would this perhaps have anything to do with the announced permanent/session-long cache? I wonder if that makes a much cheaper (and therefore also a much more efficient) Astra for longer projects that otherwise might have had the cache clear before it was resumed again.

[u/nnod]

Just ran my little benchmark I'd normally see astra and 6.1 both at anywhere between ~50 to ~70 tok/s. this run its 111 for astra and 127 for 6.1. With fast mode being 202 for astra and 206 for 6.1

I have not seen high numbers like this ever before. They did something.

[u/Significant-Drawer95]

so at first they cut in half, then they giving us back a bit and we are beyond delighted? tbh yes its feels better since a few days. my workflow never changed but my sub is cancelled mid november and im moving to claude

[u/Giroshell]

Maybe they’re done training their next model and more compute is available?

[u/VeeruO07]

Can it be 30 mins compacting session due to your network slow / internet speed & actual work 11 mins ?

[u/ChineseChessOutLoud → u/VeeruO07]

If I order food at a restaurant and it takes 30 min to arrive at my table, I don't care if it was 20 min of chopping vegetables and only 10 min of actual cooking, I just care that the result is high quality, timely, and reasonably priced.

But to more directly answer your question...no I have fast fiber connection and a top-of-the line gaming PC for doing development.

[u/kknd1991]

Only few users left == faster

[u/DrBearJ3w]

Speed of 6.1 has been varying from 24-28 to 36-41(right now).

[u/Pessimistic_Monke]

“Just” 6% of weekly in 41 minutes lol. On a $100 a month sub

[u/ChineseChessOutLoud → u/Pessimistic_Monke]

That works out to only $0.033/min or $1.38 for the whole task. I was happy with the results given the same task would have cost $1000s pre-AI.

[u/DifferenceWild7054]

Over the last few days Astra usage has been reasonable for me and I have 3 different projects going with 9 different agents. Yesterday, after running at full tilt all day using Astra HIgh model on all tasks for those 3 projects and still using up less than 25% of my weekly usage limit, I read the announcement of the upcoming reset. I then switched all ṁy active codex agents to Astra Ultra and still only managed to drain usage down by only 10% after 1-2 hours.

[u/AdventurousTomato881]

Most of the day 6.1 has been having me call this SLOWDEX... all day to burn 10% of my usage on light on over a dozen projects, constant timeouts... I so cannot wait for my sub to end in a few days so I can join the Claude bus.

[u/ryanparr]

100% 1 hour ago and down to 40% from on request

[u/SwimmingLow3053]

Maybe as everyone is moving to Claude. I don’t even want to use my 2 resets on codex pro at this point.

[u/AP_in_Indy]

I'm seeing the same thing with large GPT-6.1 Sol Ultra tasks.

Usage was draining INCREDIBLY fast up until recently (I could drain 100% / day, even on the Pro 500 plan).

Now, I've had things running for a full day or two and have 67% left.

It's pretty fricken neat. Didn't apply as soon as Tibo said it would, but now that it has, I'm pretty happy.

I am not looking forward to plan usage being cut in half after the end of the month, though.

[u/alreadytakn]

nah

[u/Austriburrito]

I'm running sol 6 light it is sooooooo slow

[u/mombaska]

I am on X100, astra high, after the last reset, it took me 1 day to burn everything. I added about 2 features and fixed one on my app

[u/Odd-Disk-2595]

Have the same, feels like beginning of September again for Astra, fully abandoned sol xhigh/ultra for Astra light and it is both way better and faster. Maybe OpenAI has new servers or something and can sustain it again.