$2 / $10
per million tokens, now the standard rate rather than an introductory one
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Cancelled
the 50% increase scheduled for September 1, withdrawn on August 25; $2/$10 is now standard
$0.0410
our measured bill for a one-shot dashboard build: about a third of Opus 5's price, and it worked first try
Claude Sonnet 5 costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output. That was the introductory rate; the scheduled 50% increase to $3/$15 on September 1 was cancelled on August 25, so $2/$10 is now the standard rate. Cache reads bill at 10% of the input rate and the Batch API takes 50% off both sides.
How much does Claude Sonnet 5 cost?
Sonnet 5 costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. The previously scheduled increase to $3/$15 was cancelled. Cache reads cost 10% of input; the Batch API discount is 50%. See Anthropic pricing.
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What the cancellation means
Use $2/$10 for Sonnet 5 budgets, not the cancelled $3/$15 rate. At the OpenAI Standard rates verified September 17, 2026, GPT-5.6 Terra costs $2/$12 for input contexts up to 272K tokens: input ties Sonnet 5, while Sonnet output is cheaper. Measure quality and token use on your workload before choosing.
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.
Where Sonnet 5 actually sits
Our metered runs put its one-shot dashboard bill at $0.0410: 65% below Opus 5, 2.5x above Haiku, and the output worked first try. For extraction, summarization, classification, and most chat traffic, this is the tier where frontier headroom stops earning its premium. The catch is the same one every fixed-model choice carries: some fraction of your traffic will exceed it, and failed cheap runs bill you twice. The escalate-on-failure pattern, or a blended model that does it per request, is how the tier is used well.
Sonnet 5 pricing questions, answered
Does Sonnet 5's price go up on September 1?
It does not. Anthropic cancelled the scheduled increase and made $2/$10 the standard rate. Cache and batch discounts remain available.
Is Sonnet 5 cheaper than GPT-5.6 Terra?
Sonnet 5 is $2/$10; GPT-5.6 Terra Standard is $2/$12 for input contexts up to 272K tokens, verified September 17, 2026. Input prices tie; Sonnet output costs less.
Can Sonnet 5 replace Opus for coding?
For routine coding, often; our identical one-shot prompt produced a working build at about a third of Opus 5's bill. For long agentic sessions and hard debugging, failure rates decide it: a cheap model that fails bills you for the retry on the expensive one anyway.
What happens to my costs if I lock in usage before September?
Nothing to lock in now: the scheduled increase was cancelled on August 25, so $2/$10 is the standard rate going forward rather than a window that closes. API pricing applies at request time regardless of when you integrated.
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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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