Comments on social media (when discounting the ironic posts) are mixed whether Astra is worth the cost increase, similar to the Fable-Opus transition.

For the novel projects I'm working on, Astra did unblock me where I was stuck with GPT 5.6 Sol, which in itself gives it value for myself, but outside of that it's not a significant improvement if at all. I have noticed Astra is more efficient so for my use case it may not be 2.5x cost.