Anthropic API Pricing: The Claude Lineup Compared

Anthropic fields 5 models at list prices from $1.00/$5.00 to $10.00/$50.00 per million tokens in and out (August 2026). On a real workload the gap between the ends is 10.0×.

The Claude lineup

Anthropic sells one family, Claude, in a straight ladder from Haiku up to Fable. There are no separate reasoning SKUs and no per-feature surcharges in the list price, which makes the lineup unusually easy to reason about: the decision is which rung, not which product.

Note that the output multiplier is 5.00× on every rung — Anthropic scales input and output in lockstep across the whole lineup. That is unusual, and it simplifies the decision: moving up costs you the same proportion no matter what shape your traffic is, so you can compare rungs on one number instead of on your input/output mix. (What the multiplier means and how to use it.)

What each step up the ladder actually costs

Priced on one real workload — a support chatbot handling 1,000 conversations a month, about 12M tokens in and 800K out:

• Claude Haiku 4.5 → Claude Sonnet 5: $16.00 → $32.00 per month, a 2.00× step
• Claude Sonnet 5 → Claude Opus 4.8: $32.00 → $80.00 per month, a 2.50× step
• Claude Opus 4.8 → Claude Opus 5: $80.00 either way — no step at all, these two are priced identically
• Claude Opus 5 → Claude Fable 5: $80.00 → $160 per month, a 2.00× step

The expensive step is Claude Sonnet 5 → Claude Opus 4.8 at 2.50× — more than a doubling for a single rung. End to end, Claude Fable 5 costs 10.0× what Claude Haiku 4.5 does on this workload — $144 a month more for the same thousand conversations.

The same six jobs, across the Claude lineup

Six concrete jobs at Anthropic's rates, cheapest highlighted. (All eight jobs, all 17 models.)

Read across a row rather than down a column. On this lineup the spread is much the same whatever the job — 10.0× for drafting against 10.0× for summarising — so the rung you pick moves your bill by a predictable factor regardless of traffic shape.

On Claude Haiku 4.5 an 80% cache hit takes the chatbot workload from $16.00 to about $7.36; on Claude Fable 5, from $160 to about $73.60 — which is below what Claude Opus 5 costs uncached. In other words, caching on the top rung of this lineup beats dropping to the rung below it without caching.

Price twins inside the lineup

Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Opus 5 are priced identically, at $5.00 in and $25.00 out. Every cost figure on this page applies to both members of that pair without adjustment, which means there is no cost argument to be had between them. Choose on capability, latency, context window or rate limits instead. Cost re-enters the decision only if one of them caches or batches better for your particular traffic shape — worth measuring rather than assuming.

Where Anthropic sits against the other providers

Within each tier Anthropic competes with the same workload priced on Google and OpenAI. On the chatbot job:

The cheapest model tracked here overall is Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite from Google, at $1.52 on this workload — 10.5× less than Anthropic's cheapest. If a workload is genuinely mechanical and high-volume, that gap is worth a look before defaulting to a single provider.

Standard-tier list prices, short context. Last checked against Anthropic's own published pricing page on 17 August 2026. Cached-input rates, the full 17-model table and the price changelog · all eight benchmark jobs.

Where to draw the line in Anthropic's lineup

Anthropic publishes 5 models here, spanning 10.0× from Claude Haiku 4.5 at the bottom to Claude Fable 5 at the top on the chatbot workload. That spread is what makes routing worth the engineering here; the general rules are on the tracker, and what follows is where Anthropic's own line falls.

The step worth arguing about is Claude Sonnet 5 → Claude Opus 4.8. Every other rung on this ladder is a 2.0×/1.0×/2.0× move; that one is 2.50×, or $48.00 a month on the chatbot workload. Test whether your hard requests actually need Claude Opus 4.8 before making it the default, because that single decision costs more than every other choice in this lineup combined.

One Anthropic model wins both shapes: Claude Haiku 4.5 is cheapest for generation-heavy work ($0.0070) and for context-heavy work ($0.0153) alike, so there is no workload where a different Anthropic rung is the cheaper answer. Ranking within Anthropic is therefore stable — the only crossings on this site happen between providers, where output multipliers differ, and that is what the tier table above is for.

Estimate your own mix with the AI API cost calculator, or price a specific piece of text with the token calculator.