$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 26.10 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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The full Opus 4.8 rate card
Input and output are only two of the lines Anthropic bills. Here is every Opus 4.8 rate on the Claude API, checked against Anthropic’s pricing page on October 28, 2026.
| Line item | $ per million tokens | How it is set |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $5.00 | Base rate |
| Output | $25.00 | Base rate |
| Cache write, 5-minute | $6.25 | 1.25x input |
| Cache write, 1-hour | $10.00 | 2x input |
| Cache hit or refresh | $0.50 | 0.1x input |
| Batch API input / output | $2.50 / $12.50 | 50% off both sides |
| Fast mode input / output (research preview) | $10 / $50 | 2x base, not available on Batch |
Claude API list prices. Caching and Batch discounts stack. The full 1M-token context window bills at the standard rate, so a 900K-token prompt pays the same per-token price as a 9K one. US-only inference (inference_geo: "us") multiplies every line by 1.1.
Two things beyond the headline rate decide most real bills. A 5-minute cache write pays for itself after a single cache hit, and a 1-hour write after two, so any agent loop that resends the same system prompt should be caching it (how prompt caching bills). And Opus 4.8 runs on Anthropic’s newer tokenizer, which Anthropic says produces about 30% more tokens for the same text than Sonnet 4.6 and earlier models. Moving to Opus 4.8 from an older Claude model can raise the bill at identical rates; the tokenizer tax calculator prices that per word.
Where Opus 4.8 sits in today’s Anthropic lineup
Opus 4.8 is no longer the cheapest Opus. Opus 5.5 lists at $4 input and $20 output, 20% below Opus 4.8 on both sides, and Anthropic bills its cache hits at 0.05x input: $0.20 per million tokens against Opus 4.8’s $0.50.
| Model | Input $/M | Output $/M | Cache hit $/M | Batch in / out |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5.1 | $10 | $50 | $0.25 | $5 / $25 |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $4 | $20 | $0.20 | $2 / $10 |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5 | $25 | $0.50 | $2.50 / $12.50 |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $5 | $25 | $0.50 | $2.50 / $12.50 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $2 | $10 | $0.10 | $1 / $5 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1 | $5 | $0.10 | $0.50 / $2.50 |
| Claude Haiku 5.5, prompts up to 100K tokens | $0.10 | $0.50 | $0.01 | $0.05 / $0.25 |
Anthropic list prices per million tokens, checked October 28, 2026. Haiku 5.5 prompts over 100,000 tokens bill at $0.50 / $2.50. Every row, with its source and check date, is in the LLM price index.
A rate table cannot tell you what a task costs. At identical rates, our July runs found Opus 4.8 billing 37% less than Opus 5 because it wrote fewer tokens. We have not metered Opus 5.5 on the same prompts, so its 20% lower rates are a reason to test it, not a measured saving. To compare models on your own prompts before you switch, follow the side-by-side recipe.
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 26.10’s preliminary benchmark scores and costs per task are on the model card. A composite score has 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 26.10 results; the current model card publishes four preliminary benchmark scores with a cost per task for Pareto.
Is Opus 5.5 cheaper than Opus 4.8?
On the rate card, yes. Opus 5.5 lists at $4 input and $20 output per million tokens against Opus 4.8’s $5/$25, and its cache hits cost $0.20 against $0.50. We have not metered Opus 5.5 on our task prompts yet, so whether it bills less per task depends on how many tokens it writes on your workload.
Does Opus 4.8 charge more for long prompts?
No. Opus 4.8 bills its full 1M-token context window at the standard $5/$25 rate, so a 900K-token request pays the same per-token price as a 9K one. The rate changes only when you opt into something: cache writes and hits, the Batch API, fast mode, or 1.1x US-only inference.
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List rates and dated competitor measurements: prices and measured bills. Preliminary Pareto 26.10 benchmark costs per task from October 1, 2026 are on the model card. Verbosity: Edition 2.
Benchmarked against this exact model. See the receipts.
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