Claude lineup vs alternatives — same workload
Identical tokens and volume, priced on each model.
| Model | Input $/1M | Output $/1M | Cost / month |
|---|
How Claude pricing works
Anthropic prices Claude per token, with a wide spread across the family. Haiku 3.5 ($0.80 / $4) is the budget workhorse, Sonnet 4 ($3 / $15) is the balanced default, and Opus 4 ($15 / $75) is the premium reasoning model — nearly 20× Haiku's price. Across all three, output is billed about five times the input rate, so the length of Claude's responses is the biggest single factor in your bill.
Two practical moves cut Claude costs the most. First, prompt caching: if you reuse a long system prompt or document context across requests, cached input is billed at a large discount — set the toggle above to see the effect. Second, tier down: a lot of production traffic that defaults to Sonnet or Opus runs perfectly well on Haiku, and the table shows what that switch is worth at your volume. Deciding between providers? Put Claude head-to-head with GPT-4o and Gemini on the AI API cost calculator, or price a whole feature with the AI app cost estimator. Setup and keys are in the Anthropic guide.
FAQ
What's Claude Sonnet's cost per 1M tokens? About $3 input and $15 output (reference, June 2026).
Is Claude cheaper than GPT-4o? Sonnet 4 ($3/$15) is slightly pricier than GPT-4o ($2.50/$10) on output; Haiku undercuts both. It depends on the model tier you pick.