$5 / $25
per million tokens, identical to Opus 5. The successor did not obsolete the price
Blog
Claude Opus 4.8 pricing: the quiet bargain in Anthropic's ladder
Opus 4.8 costs $5 input / $25 output per million tokens, exactly what Opus 5 costs. Same rate card, older model, and in our metered runs it produced the same working output from 38% fewer tokens. Sometimes the previous flagship is the deal.
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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: what Pareto, a blended model, paid per task across seven benchmarks, same harness
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. 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 |
| Pareto | at cost | $0.0196 | $0.0018 |
| 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 benchmark receipts, not this table alone.
The baseline everyone measures against
Opus 4.8 is also the model our public benchmark work is anchored to: seven benchmarks, same harness, both sides published, where blended routing matched or beat it on every one at 1 to 45 cents on its dollar per task. If you run Opus 4.8 in production, that comparison was built for you: the model card carries the full table and the harness link.
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 38% 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?
From our meters: a one-shot code-generation task $0.0724, an invoice extraction $0.0093. Per-benchmark task costs, measured in the same harness as the quality scores, are on the model card: $0.26 for a SWE-Bench Verified task, $1.29... that one is the Opus column; see the full table.
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Benchmarked against this exact model. See the receipts.
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