$5 / $25
per million tokens, identical to Opus 5. The successor did not obsolete the price
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-38%
fewer output tokens than Opus 5 on our identical dashboard prompt: $0.0724 vs $0.1158 measured
1–45¢
on the Opus 4.8 dollar in the historical July 2026 benchmark exhibit; not a Pareto 26.9 result
Claude Opus 4.8 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output, the same list price as its successor Opus 5. In our July 2026 measurements it completed the identical task in 38% fewer output tokens than Opus 5, making it the cheaper flagship per request.
How much does Claude Opus 4.8 cost?
$5 per million input tokens, $25 per million output (Anthropic pricing), with cache reads at 10% of input and 50% off through the Batch API. Opus 4.8 inherited the price set by the November 2025 cut and passed it unchanged to Opus 5 in July 2026.
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Why anyone still prices the previous flagship
Because it is the benchmark baseline of record right now, and because of a measured quirk: on our identical one-shot dashboard prompt, Opus 4.8 delivered a working result in 2,877 output tokens where Opus 5 used 4,610. Same rates, so the older model's bill was $0.0724 against $0.1158, and the full 12-run battery confirmed it: 77% apart, with 4.8 scoring 0.92 on the Verbosity Index against Opus 5's 1.48. If your workload is well-served by 4.8 today, the upgrade costs real money in verbosity before it earns anything in capability.
The same two tasks on every model we could meter
We sent an identical dashboard-generation prompt and an identical invoice-extraction prompt to every model we can call directly, on July 28, 2026, and recorded the actual bills. No estimates in the measured rows.
| Model | Rate $/M in / out | Dashboard task, measured | Extraction task, measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5 | $10 / $50 | $0.1462 | $0.0148* |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5 / $25 | $0.1158 | $0.0114 |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $5 / $25 | $0.0724 | $0.0093 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2 / $10 | $0.0410 | $0.0037 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1 / $5 | $0.0162 | $0.0016 |
Measured 2026-07-28, one shot each, default settings, list prices. *Fable extraction is same-tokens list math from our earlier run; every other cell is a metered bill. Prompts published verbatim in the Fable 5 breakdown. All outputs completed the task; quality-per-dollar comparisons need the published benchmark scores, not this table alone.
The baseline everyone measures against
Pareto 26.9’s published benchmark scores are on the model card. Measured task costs and a composite score have not been published for this release.
Opus 4.8 pricing questions, answered
Is Opus 4.8 cheaper than Opus 5?
On the rate card they are identical at $5/$25. On measured bills, 4.8 was 37% cheaper on our identical prompt because it writes fewer tokens. Rate cards do not bill you; token counts do.
Will Opus 4.8 be deprecated now that Opus 5 is out?
Anthropic has historically kept prior flagships available for a transition window, but deprecation schedules are theirs to set and change. If you are building something long-lived against 4.8 specifically, abstract the model string.
How does Opus 4.8 compare to Fable 5 on price?
Fable 5 is exactly double: $10/$50 against $5/$25, on both sides of the meter. Whether the hardest-reasoning edge justifies 2x is workload-specific; our Fable 5 breakdown publishes real bills for both.
What does a real task cost on Opus 4.8?
In our July 2026 measurements, a one-shot Opus 4.8 code-generation task billed $0.0724 and invoice extraction $0.0093. A historical SWE-Bench Verified task billed $1.29 on Opus 4.8 and $0.26 on Pareto. These are historical exhibits, not Pareto 26.9 measured costs; the current model card publishes five benchmark scores without task costs.
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VS
List rates and dated competitor measurements: prices and measured bills. Pareto 26.9 measured task costs are not published. Verbosity: Edition 2.
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