What Does Claude Opus 5 Cost?
Claude Opus 5 costs $5.00 per million input tokens and $25.00 per million output tokens. A workload of one million tokens in and one million out costs $30.00.
Those are the list API rates as published by Anthropic and checked on 16 September 2026. Opus 5 launched on 24 July 2026 at exactly the price Opus 4.8 had been charging.
Most of what is written about Opus 5 pricing was drafted before launch from rumour. Every figure on this page is read off the vendors' own pricing documentation. AI Perks tracks the credit programs that cover these bills: $7.7M across 194 companies.
What Did Not Change About Claude Opus 5 Pricing
Three things held steady, and the second one is barely reported anywhere.
Opus 5 shipped at Opus 4.8's price. A new flagship generation arrived with no price increase on either side of the meter. That is not the industry norm.
Anthropic cancelled a scheduled Sonnet 5 increase. Sonnet 5 was set to rise from $2/$10 to $3/$15 per million input and output tokens on 1 September 2026. Anthropic called that off. In its own words: "The previously scheduled increase to $3/$15 per million input/output tokens on September 1, 2026 will not occur." The $2/$10 rate, originally framed as introductory through 31 August 2026, is now simply the standard price.
That cancelled increase was a 50% rise on both meters. On a workload of 50M input and 10M output tokens a month, it is the difference between $200 and $300, an estimate derived from the listed rates.
The ladder kept its shape. Opus 5 is exactly 2.5x Sonnet 5 and exactly 5x Haiku 4.5, on both input and output.
Claude Opus 5 Pricing vs Every Current Alternative
Opus 5 sits in the middle of the current market at $30 per million in and million out, half the cost of GPT-6 Astra and 2.5x the cost of Sonnet 5.
All figures USD per million tokens. The blended column is a derived estimate assuming one million input and one million output tokens.
| Model | Input | Output | 1M in + 1M out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5.1 | $10.00 | $50.00 | $60.00 |
| Claude Mythos 5.1 | $10.00 | $50.00 | $60.00 |
| GPT-6 Astra | $10.00 | $50.00 | $60.00 |
| GPT-5.5 | $5.00 | $30.00 | $35.00 |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5.00 | $25.00 | $30.00 |
| GPT-5.6 Sol | $4.00 | $20.00 | $24.00 |
| GPT-5.4 | $2.50 | $15.00 | $17.50 |
| GPT-5.6 Terra | $2.00 | $12.00 | $14.00 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2.00 | $10.00 | $12.00 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 | $5.00 | $6.00 |
| Meta Muse Spark 1.3 | $1.25 | $4.25 | $5.50 |
| GPT-5.4 mini | $0.75 | $4.50 | $5.25 |
| GPT-5.4 nano | $0.20 | $1.25 | $1.45 |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | $0.20 | $1.20 | $1.40 |
Three readings worth taking from that table:
Opus 5 undercuts GPT-5.5 on output while matching it on input. Both charge $5.00 in. Opus charges $25.00 out against GPT-5.5's $30.00, which is 16.7% less on the output meter.
GPT-6 Astra is exactly 2x Opus 5 on both meters. Astra also carries a long context tier: above 200,000 tokens it bills $20.00 / $75.00. Anthropic publishes no equivalent surcharge for Opus 5.
Anthropic's whole line holds a constant 5x output multiple. Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, Fable and Mythos all charge exactly five times as much for output as for input. OpenAI's current line is mixed: Astra and Sol are 5x, while GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4, Terra and Luna are 6x. If your workload is output-heavy, that structural difference matters more than the headline input rate.
What Opus 5 Actually Costs Per Month
At 50 million input and 10 million output tokens a month, Claude Opus 5 costs an estimated $500. The same workload runs $1,000 on GPT-6 Astra and $200 on Sonnet 5.
That volume is a reasonable stand-in for a small team running an agent or a coding assistant in production. All figures below are derived from the list prices above, not from vendor calculators.
| Model | Est. monthly cost at 50M in / 10M out |
|---|---|
| GPT-6 Astra, Fable 5.1, Mythos 5.1 | $1,000 |
| GPT-5.5 | $550 |
| Claude Opus 5 | $500 |
| GPT-5.6 Sol | $400 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $200 |
| Meta Muse Spark 1.3 | $105 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $100 |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | $22 |
The gap between Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 is $300 a month at this volume. The gap between Opus 5 and Astra is $500 a month. Both are large enough that tier selection, not vendor loyalty, is the decision that moves your bill.
A modest credit grant covers a year of this. AI Perks exists to find you one.
Which Claude Tier Fits Which Workload
Pick the cheapest tier that clears your quality bar, then buy back capability only where it demonstrably helps.
Haiku 4.5 at $1/$5. The floor of the Anthropic line, an estimated $100 a month at the volume above. Suited to classification, routing, extraction and high-volume short calls.
Sonnet 5 at $2/$10. Twice Haiku, 40% of Opus. This is the tier whose price Anthropic just declined to raise, which makes it the best-value slot in the line right now on price alone.
Opus 5 at $5/$25. 2.5x Sonnet. Worth it where a single wrong answer costs more than the price difference: long agent runs, complex refactors, work that a human would otherwise have to redo.
Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 at $10/$50. Double Opus. Mythos is limited availability.
The honest pattern is mixed routing. Run Haiku or Sonnet by default and escalate to Opus 5 only on the calls that need it. A workload that sends 20% of its traffic to Opus 5 and 80% to Sonnet 5 costs an estimated $260 a month at our reference volume, against $500 for all-Opus.
What Anthropic Has Not Published
Several things people assume about Opus 5 pricing are simply not in the published price list, and this page will not invent them.
Anthropic's price list shows one input rate and one output rate for Opus 5, with no separate long context tier of the kind OpenAI publishes for Astra above 200,000 tokens.
There is no published Haiku 5 price. Haiku 4.5 at $1/$5 remains the cheapest tier in Anthropic's current line, and no successor pricing has been announced.
Rate limits and free-tier ceilings are not covered here. They vary by account and are not stable enough to publish as fact.
xAI and Grok token prices are omitted deliberately. Public sources conflict badly enough that any number printed here would be a guess. Check xAI's own console for current rates.
Google Gemini prices are omitted because they were not verified in this research. An unverified price table is worse than no price table.
Free Credits That Cover the Opus 5 Bill
A $500 monthly Opus 5 workload is an estimated $6,000 a year. Credit programs routinely cover multiples of that.
AI Perks tracks $7.7M in credits across 194 companies, spanning model providers, compute and the rest of the stack a production AI product actually bills for.
Two things worth knowing before you plan around credits:
Model credits and compute credits are separate bills. Anthropic credits pay for tokens. Your inference host, database and observability layer bill separately. Teams that secure only one of the two still have a real invoice.
Not every provider runs a program. Meta, for example, has no startup credit program for Muse. Its Contributor tier prices at $0.10/$0.20 per million tokens, with the trade that Meta trains on your prompts and completions. That is a pricing decision with a data policy attached, not a free lunch.
The AI Model category at getaiperks.com is where the Anthropic and OpenAI credit programs are tracked, alongside the compute and tooling programs that sit next to them on the same invoice. Approval criteria differ from program to program, which is why breadth beats betting the year on one name.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Claude Opus 5 cost per million tokens?
Claude Opus 5 costs $5.00 per million input tokens and $25.00 per million output tokens. A job using one million of each costs $30.00. That is the same rate Opus 4.8 charged, so the July 2026 launch carried no price increase. Credit programs covering it are listed at getaiperks.com.
Is Claude Opus 5 cheaper than GPT-6 Astra?
Yes, by exactly half on both meters. Astra costs $10.00 input and $50.00 output per million tokens against Opus 5's $5.00 and $25.00. Astra also bills $20.00 / $75.00 above 200,000 tokens of context, a surcharge Anthropic does not publish for Opus 5.
Did Claude Sonnet 5 get more expensive in September 2026?
No. Anthropic had scheduled Sonnet 5 to rise from $2/$10 to $3/$15 per million tokens on 1 September 2026, then cancelled it. The $2/$10 rate is now the standard price rather than an introductory one, a 50% increase that did not happen.
How much more does Opus 5 cost than Sonnet 5?
Exactly 2.5 times, on both input and output. Opus is $5/$25 against Sonnet's $2/$10. At 50 million input and 10 million output tokens a month, that is an estimated $500 versus $200. Free credits that absorb the difference are tracked at getaiperks.com.
Which Claude model is cheapest?
Claude Haiku 4.5 at $1.00 input and $5.00 output per million tokens is the cheapest model in Anthropic's current line, one fifth the price of Opus 5. Anthropic has not published pricing for a Haiku 5, so 4.5 remains the floor as of September 2026.
Can I get free Claude Opus 5 credits?
Yes. Multiple programs issue Anthropic credits, and the amounts run far past a typical annual API bill. A $500 a month Opus 5 workload is an estimated $6,000 a year, comfortably inside a single grant. AI Perks tracks $7.7M across 194 companies, including which programs are open now.
Every price on this page was checked. Now go get someone else to pay it.