$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the 50% increase scheduled for September 1, withdrawn on August 10; $2/$10 is now standard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 10, 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.
What about Claude Sonnet 5.5?
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 on September 28, 2026 at the same list price: $2 input / $10 output per million tokens, cache reads at $0.10 (0.05x input, half of Sonnet 5’s $0.20), cache writes at $2.50, and 50% off through the Batch API. The API model id is claude-sonnet-5-5. Budgets built on Sonnet 5's rate carry over unchanged. We have not metered Sonnet 5.5 yet, so the measured bills below are Sonnet 5's.
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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 October 19, 2026, GPT-6.1 Sol also costs $2/$10 for short-context requests, so Sonnet 5, Sonnet 5.5 and Sol tie on list price. 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 5.5 | $2 / $10 | not measured | not measured |
| 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. Sonnet 5.5 shipped after these runs. 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 4.5, 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. One step below, Claude Haiku 5.5 now lists at $0.10 input and $0.50 output for prompts up to 100,000 tokens ($0.50 / $2.50 above that), a twentieth of Sonnet’s rate. We have not metered it on these prompts, so the Haiku row above is Haiku 4.5’s bill.
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.
Should I use Sonnet 5 or Sonnet 5.5?
Price does not decide it: Sonnet 5.5, released September 28, 2026, lists at the same $2/$10 per million tokens. Test both on your own traffic; we have not metered Sonnet 5.5 yet.
Is Sonnet 5 cheaper than GPT-6.1 Sol?
Not on list price: Sonnet 5 is $2/$10 and GPT-6.1 Sol Standard is $2/$10 for short-context requests, verified October 19, 2026. Cached input differs: Sonnet 5 reads bill at $0.20 per million, Sonnet 5.5 and Sol at $0.10.
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 10, 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. Preliminary Pareto 26.10 benchmark costs per task from October 1, 2026 are on the model card. Verbosity: Edition 2.
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