$10 / $50
Fable 5 API list price per million tokens, input / output. Exactly 2x Opus 4.8.
Skip the read: get a measured recommendation in a few quick questions. Run the Stack Finder
$0.1462
Fable 5's actual bill for a one-shot "build me a dashboard" request
$5 / $25
batched Fable 5 via the Batch API: 50% off both sides, exactly Opus sync prices
Claude Fable 5 costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output on the Anthropic API as of July 2026, exactly double Claude Opus 5. Cache reads bill at 10% of the input rate, the Batch API halves both sides, and inside Claude apps Fable 5 now draws usage credits.
TL;DR
- $10 in / $50 out per million tokens, double Opus. The Batch API halves it; cache reads cost a tenth.
- 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.
- A real Claude Code bug-fix session billed $0.59; caching alone saved 2.6x. Context reads, not answers, drain credits.
- History says the price drops when the next tier ships; the Opus-class cut was 67% overnight.
Price-change alerts
These rates have already moved this year, and the next tier usually moves them again. One email per price change, with the math above redone for real sessions. Nothing else, ever.
Or skip the waiting: test your workload in the beta.How much does Fable 5 cost?
Claude Fable 5 is Anthropic's Mythos-class model, the tier above Opus. On the API it costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, with prompt-caching discounts on input (Anthropic's pricing page; independent trackers pricepertoken and espressio agree). That is exactly double Claude Opus 4.8's $5 / $25 list.
The confusion is not the rate. It is the July change: Fable 5 moved out of subscription plans and onto usage credits (TechTimes). If you were using it inside a Pro or Max plan, you are now metered. Same model, new meter. If that meter is running inside Claude Code, you can keep the tool and change the model: Claude Code works with Pareto through a few environment variables, tested live.
Two levers cut the list price if your workload fits them: prompt-cache reads bill at 10% of the input rate, so a heavily-cached Fable prompt reads at $1 per million input tokens, and the Batch API takes 50% off both sides for asynchronous jobs, which puts batched Fable 5 at $5 / $25, exactly Opus prices (Anthropic pricing). If your Fable workload can wait an hour, that is the cheapest legitimate way to run it.
Fable 5.1: same rate, cheaper cache reads
Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 on September 1, 2026 as Fable 5’s successor, at the same $10 input / $50 output per million tokens. The change is the cache: Fable 5.1 bills cache reads at 0.025x input, $0.25 per million tokens against Fable 5’s $1. Cache writes ($12.50 for 5 minutes, $20 for 1 hour) and the Batch API price ($5 / $25) are unchanged. The model id is claude-fable-5-1 (Anthropic pricing, checked October 30, 2026).
That matters most for agents, because agents mostly read. The Claude Code session below read 114,419 cached tokens, which billed $0.1144 at Fable 5’s rate. The same tokens at Fable 5.1’s rate come to $0.0286, taking the session from $0.5887 to about $0.50. That is same-token list math, not a metered Fable 5.1 bill; every bill on this page was measured on Fable 5.
One step down, the Opus tier did get cheaper: Claude Opus 5.5, released September 22, 2026, lists at $4 / $20, 60% below Fable on both sides.
Fable 5 vs Opus, GPT-6.1 Sol, and the rest of the market
Pricing questions are comparison questions. Here is the whole ladder (Anthropic rates verified October 30, 2026; OpenAI rates verified October 1, 2026), with each model's list price applied to the same concrete job: a dashboard-generation run measured July 28, 77 tokens in and 2,615 out (the featured test below is a separate run of the same prompt) (Anthropic prices, OpenAI prices).
| Model | Input $/M | Output $/M | The dashboard task | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5.1 | $10.00 | $50.00 | $0.1315 | Fable 5’s successor, September 1, 2026; cache reads $0.25 |
| Claude Fable 5 | $10.00 | $50.00 | $0.1315 | Mythos class, above Opus |
| GPT-6 Astra | $10.00 | $50.00 | $0.1315 | OpenAI premium tier |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $4.00 | $20.00 | $0.0526 | newest Opus, September 22, 2026 |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5.00 | $25.00 | $0.0658 | Opus flagship until September |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $5.00 | $25.00 | $0.0658 | prior flagship |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | $2.00 | $10.00 | $0.0263 | OpenAI frontier |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $2.00 | $10.00 | $0.0263 | released September 28, 2026 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2.00 | $10.00 | $0.0263 | introductory in July; now standard, Sep 1 increase cancelled |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 | $5.00 | $0.0132 | prior Anthropic volume tier |
| Claude Haiku 5.5 | $0.10 | $0.50 | $0.0013 | Anthropic volume tier; prompts over 100K tokens bill $0.50 / $2.50 |
| GPT-6 Luna | $0.10 | $0.50 | $0.0013 | OpenAI volume tier |
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.
Read the ladder honestly and two things are true at once. Fable 5 shares the top of the market with GPT-6 Astra at $10/$50, five times GPT-6.1 Sol on output. And the volume tiers near the bottom are genuinely cheap: if Haiku-class quality clears your bar for a workload, list price already solves your problem. The expensive mistake is the middle: paying Fable or Astra rates on traffic that a cheaper tier, or a blended model, handles at the same quality. Quality per dollar is the actual question, and that needs receipts rather than a price sheet, which is why we publish benchmark scores with cost per task.
Test 1: "Build a sortable invoice dashboard"
Nobody thinks in tokens, so we sent the identical prompt to each model and kept everything: the untouched first response, the token counts, and the actual metered bill. One shot, single file, no retries.
| Claude Fable 5 | Pareto | |
|---|---|---|
| The bill for this request | $0.1462 | $0.0196 |
| Tokens, in / out | 103 / 2,903 | 68 / 3,118 |
| Time to complete | 27s | 62s |
| Works first try | yes | yes |
Fable 5 via the Anthropic API at list price. Pareto as metered and billed on the day. Same prompt, verbatim, 2026-07-28.
Both produced a working, styled, sortable dashboard on the first attempt: summary cards, status badges, click-to-sort. Do not take the screenshots' word for it. These are the live outputs, exactly as returned:
Test 2: "Build me a game"
Same protocol, more ambitious ask: a complete Breakout game with paddle physics, five rows of bricks, lives, win and game-over states, and a restart button.
| Claude Fable 5 | Pareto | |
|---|---|---|
| The bill for this request | $0.2269 | $0.0220 |
| Tokens, in / out | 125 / 4,514 | 88 / 3,508 |
| Time to complete | 40s | 71s |
| Playable first try | yes | yes |
Play them both. You are playing the two-cent one second:
The honest trade
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. For the head-to-head, see Pareto 26.10 vs Fable 5: scores and cost per task. Against the Opus tier, the same task is metered in Claude Opus 5 vs Fable 5 and Claude Opus 4.8 vs Fable 5.
What a real Claude Code session costs on Fable 5
One-shot prompts are not why your credits vanish. Agentic coding sessions are. So we ran one for real: Claude Code, model pinned to claude-fable-5, pointed at a small Python repo with two seeded bugs and a failing test suite, instructed to fix them. It read the code, found both bugs, edited the file, re-ran the tests, and finished in 39 seconds and 5 API calls. Every request, from the actual transcript:
| Call | What the agent did | Output tokens | Cache read | Cache write |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Read the repo, ran the tests | 307 | 0 | 27,261 |
| 2 | Read the buggy file | 129 | 27,261 | 941 |
| 3 | Fixed both bugs (two edits) | 1,022 | 28,202 | 606 |
| 4 | Re-ran the tests: all pass | 157 | 28,808 | 1,340 |
| 5 | Wrote the summary | 244 | 30,148 | 352 |
| Session total | 1,859 | 114,419 | 30,500 |
Measured 2026-07-28, Claude Code headless, max 15 turns, no retries. Rates: $10/M input, $50/M output, cache reads $1/M, cache writes $12.50/M. The 144,929 context total also counts the session's 10 uncached fresh input tokens, which the per-call rows omit.
$0.5887
the session's bill. Our rate math and Claude Code's own reported cost agree to the fourth decimal.
78x
context tokens moved (144,929) versus tokens actually written (1,859). You pay for what the agent reads.
2.6x
what this session would have cost without prompt caching: $1.54 instead of $0.59. Caching is not optional at Fable rates.
Scale it: an engineer who runs twenty sessions like this in a day is spending about $12 a day, roughly $260 a month, on a toy-sized repo. Real repos carry far more context per read, and context is the meter. If your credits are draining, this table is why: it is almost never the answer tokens, it is the reading.
Reproduce this yourself
Numbers you cannot check are marketing. Everything above is one API call away from verification: same prompts, default settings, no retries, measured 2026-07-28. Fable 5 was called as claude-fable-5 on the Anthropic API at list price.
The exact dashboard prompt, verbatim
"Build a single-file HTML page: a sortable data table of 12 SaaS invoices (vendor, date, amount, status) with a summary bar showing total spend and count of overdue items. Clean light theme, all CSS and JS inline, no external libraries. Return only the complete HTML file in one code block."
The exact game prompt, verbatim
"Build a single-file HTML game: Breakout. Paddle follows the mouse, ball physics with angle based on paddle hit position, 5 rows of colorful bricks, score counter, lives counter (3 lives), win and game-over states with a restart button. Dark theme, all CSS and JS inline, no external libraries. Return only the complete HTML file in one code block."
The raw outputs are hosted unmodified (the embeds above are the actual files), and the broader benchmark methodology, with pinned dependencies, is in the public evaluation harness. If your run disagrees with ours, publish it.
Everyday tasks, same pattern
Code generation is the expensive end. We metered four ordinary production tasks the same way: invoice-to-JSON extraction came to $0.0148 at Fable 5 list versus $0.0018 on Pareto; a unit-economics analysis $0.026 versus $0.0033; meeting-notes summarization $0.013 versus $0.0016. A useful rule of thumb: a code-generation request lands around a dime to a quarter on Fable 5; short structured tasks a penny or three. Multiply by your daily volume and the credits notification starts making sense.
What would your traffic cost?
Monthly bill estimator, current rates with historical token profiles
| Model | Per request | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5 | $0.1549 | $4,647.00 | $56,538.50 |
| Claude Fable 5.1 | $0.1360 | $4,080.00 | $49,640.00 |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | $0.0272 | $816.00 | $9,928.00 |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $0.0544 | $1,632.00 | $19,856.00 |
| Claude Opus 5 | $0.1004 | $3,012.00 | $36,646.00 |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $0.0626 | $1,878.00 | $22,849.00 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $0.0272 | $816.00 | $9,928.00 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $0.0307 | $921.30 | $11,209.15 |
| GPT-6 Luna | $0.0014 | $40.80 | $496.40 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $0.0083 | $250.05 | $3,042.28 |
| Pareto, list-price estimate | $0.0087 | $261.60 | $3,182.80 |
Or paste your actual prompt
Paste a prompt above to price it.
Token profiles come from our measured July 28 runs. The verbosity adjustment scales each model's output tokens by its measured Verbosity Index; GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5 stay unadjusted until we can meter them, so with the adjustment on, the Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 rows are not like-for-like with the adjusted Fable 5 and Opus 5 rows; switch it off to compare list rates on identical tokens. List prices from the table above; Sonnet 5 shown at its standard $2/$10 rate. OpenAI Standard short-context rates and Claude Sonnet 5.5 verified October 1, 2026; Claude Fable 5.1 ($10/$50) and Claude Opus 5.5 ($4/$20) per Anthropic pricing, verified October 31, 2026. The Pareto row prices the input and output token profile at $0.80/$3.20 per million tokens. It is a same-token estimate, not a measured Pareto 26.10 task bill.
That monthly number is testable: put $100 against your own workload, or open this calculator as a standalone tool.
Is Fable 5 worth 2x Opus?
For some workloads, genuinely yes. Fable 5 is the strongest generally available model on the hardest reasoning problems, and when a task fails on cheaper models and succeeds on Fable, it is worth every cent. Failed cheap runs are the most expensive tokens you can buy. But most production traffic is not the hardest reasoning problem, and paying the frontier premium on every request means paying it on the many requests that did not need it.
Will Fable 5 get cheaper? The price history says probably.
People are literally searching this question, so here is the pattern instead of a shrug. Anthropic's flagship-tier pricing over the last two and a half years:
| Model | Era | Input $/M | Output $/M | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude 3 Opus → Opus 4.1 | Mar 2024 – Nov 2025 | $15.00 | $75.00 | flagship price held for ~20 months |
| Claude Opus 4.5 | Nov 2025 | $5.00 | $25.00 | the 67% cut, overnight |
| Claude Opus 4.8 → Opus 5 | 2026 | $5.00 | $25.00 | new flagships kept the lower price |
| Claude Fable 5 | Jul 2026 | $10.00 | $50.00 | new premium tier opens above flagship |
| Claude Fable 5.1 | Sep 2026 | $10.00 | $50.00 | successor kept the rate; cache reads cut 75% |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | Sep 2026 | $4.00 | $20.00 | first Opus list cut since 4.5: 20% on both sides |
Sources: Anthropic's Opus 4.5 announcement, the 67% cut documented, Opus 5 launch coverage, Anthropic’s current pricing for Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5.
The pattern: frontier capability holds a premium price while it is scarce, then reprices sharply once a newer tier sits above it and serving costs mature. Opus-class intelligence cost $75 per million output tokens for twenty months, then $25 overnight. Fable 5 occupies the position Opus held in 2024 and 2025: the top of the ladder, priced for scarcity.
Our honest read, dated July 28, 2026: do not architect around today's $10/$50 as permanent. If history rhymes, the price drops when the next Mythos-class model ships above it, and the interim discounts (caching, batch) are how Anthropic lets cost-sensitive workloads in early. What we would not do is wait: if Fable-class quality clears a bar cheaper tiers cannot, the price of waiting is the failed runs in the meantime.
Update, October 30, 2026: the next Fable did not drop the list price. Fable 5.1 kept $10/$50 and cut cache reads by 75%, so the discount went to agents that reread context. The list-price cut landed one tier down instead, with Opus 5.5 at $4/$20, which Anthropic says performs at Fable 5.1’s level on most work. The read holds: do not budget around $10/$50 as permanent, and test the tier below before paying it.
Fable 5 pricing questions, answered
Is Fable 5 free anywhere?
Not anymore. Fable 5 was included in some Claude subscription plans as a promotion, and that ended in July 2026: it now draws usage credits inside Claude apps and bills per token on the API. If a site offers "free Fable 5," read the fine print about what is actually serving your request.
Why did Fable 5 move from subscriptions to usage credits?
Fable-class inference is expensive to serve, and flat subscriptions meant heavy users were massively subsidized. Metering moves the cost onto usage. The practical effect for you: the per-request numbers on this page are now the right mental model, whether you reach Fable through the API, Claude Code, or an editor integration.
How does Fable 5 compare to Opus 5 on price?
Exactly double, on both sides of the meter: $10 versus $5 per million input tokens, $50 versus $25 per million output. Whether the quality delta on your workload justifies 2x is the real question, and it is workload-specific: measure it on your own traffic before committing either way.
How much does Fable 5.1 cost?
The same as Fable 5: $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, with the Batch API at $5 / $25. The difference is caching: Fable 5.1 cache reads cost $0.25 per million tokens, a quarter of Fable 5’s $1. Anthropic released it on September 1, 2026 as claude-fable-5-1.
What is the cheapest way to run Fable 5?
Combine the two discounts. Prompt-cache reads bill at 10% of the input rate, so keep your system prompt and shared context stable. The Batch API takes 50% off both sides for jobs that can wait, which prices batched Fable at $5 / $25, the same as synchronous Opus. Cached, batched Fable is a fraction of the naive list price.
Does Fable 5 cost more in Claude Code or Cursor?
The meter is the same: tokens. Coding agents are token-hungry because they read files into context and iterate, so a single agentic session can run many multiples of the one-shot numbers above. If your credits are draining fast, it is usually context size, not the per-token rate, doing the damage. We published a real session's full ledger above: five API calls, $0.59, 78x more tokens read than written.
A Fable 5 and Opus alternative
What produced the cheaper bills above
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.
Not sure which model fits?
The Stack Finder asks a few quick questions about your workload and gives you a straight recommendation. No account required.
Compare any two models
VS
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.
Test Pareto on your own workload.
Get started with Unbiased
Try it on one part of your codebase
Set Pareto up in the coding agent you already use and give it a week of real work. Pareto starts at $10 a month.
Hand this to your agent
Read https://unbiased.ai/blog/fable-5-pricing/ and tell me what matters for my setup. If Pareto fits, read https://unbiased.ai/works-with/agent.md, find the coding agent I use on this machine, and set it up to use Pareto. Ask before changing any file, and never ask me to paste my API key into chat.
It asks before changing files and never needs your key in chat. Read the agent runbook
