Fable 5 saga is finally coming to an end with Anthropic deciding to include the flagship model in Max. Since I am on Max tier for this month temporarily, the announcement is disappointing in two ways: a. Fable won’t be available on a similar price tier as GPT 5.6 Sol, and b. Fable is simply too inefficient when it comes to token counts compared to Sol. Whichever way you cut it, you can get a better deal from Codex.

On the ChatGPT side of the business, 5.6 Terra is included in tiers as low as the Go plan ($8 per month). Sol is specifically included starting from the Plus tier ($20). Considering the practicality, I suppose even for a hobbyist a Plus tier plan would be recommended. As far as I know, these subscriptions are monthly only — a cancel-at-any-time deal. Fable, on the other hand, is only included on Max or premium seats. The gap between $20 per month from Pro tier to $100 makes this a commitment issue. Do you need Fable, or more down to Earth, is $100 subscription the only solution that works?

On the more technical side of the LLM models, both community consensus and research published since establish similar performance between Sol and Fable. Sol charges roughly one third of Fable for a similar task. The findings are no doubt still too synthetic to be applied to the real world as-is; however, anecdotally, the community seems to back up the claim that it is at least twice as efficient as Fable. The only upside left for Fable is it prints marginally better results, again matching the community consensus. It begs the question: why pay double for Fable when you could try it on Sol and still have one more go to come out even?

What makes the ChatGPT angle particularly enticing for existing Claude users is that there is no commitment to ChatGPT subscriptions. As it stands, if I want an additional $20 worth of tokens, another subscription is always a better deal than pay-as-you-go. OpenAI is also positioning itself as a more reliable choice between the two. Anthropic’s current complimentary weekly reset applies indiscriminately, whereas when OpenAI issues one, it is banked so the user can decide when to make use of it. One might argue complimentary is just that, “complimentary”, but considering how often both companies issue handouts as compensation for downtime, I don’t find it particularly convincing to call it a genuine goodwill gesture.