TL;DR: As of July 10, 2026, the Claude API bills per token, not per subscription. Input runs $1 to $10 per million tokens and output $5 to $50 per million, by model. Haiku 4.5 is the floor ($1 in / $5 out), Opus 4.8 sits at the flagship middle ($5 / $25), and Fable 5 is the ceiling ($10 / $50). Prices below are pulled live and dated.
Search "claude api pricing" and you land on raw comparison tables. costgoat.com, pricepertoken.com, llmpricecheck.com, all ranking a grid of numbers with no judgment attached. We checked the July 9, 2026 results for this query and its calculator variants: no AI Overview, a thin field, and not one page that connects the price to a real bill. This page does. Every figure comes from the OpenRouter models API snapshot fetched July 10, 2026, cross-checked against Anthropic's published rates. Then we do the math a raw table skips.
Claude API pricing right now (live table)
As of July 10, 2026, the Claude API sets a price per token, not a subscription fee. The cost per million tokens runs $1 to $10 for input and $5 to $50 for output, by model: Haiku 4.5 ($1/$5), Sonnet 5 ($2/$10), Opus 4.8 ($5/$25), Fable 5 ($10/$50). You pay for input tokens and output tokens separately, and output always costs 5x the input rate.
| Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Context | Cached read / 1M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 | $5.00 | 200K | $0.10 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2.00* | $10.00* | 1M | $0.20 |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $5.00 | $25.00 | 1M | $0.50 |
| Claude Fable 5 | $10.00 | $50.00 | 1M | $1.00 |
*Sonnet 5 is on introductory pricing through August 31, 2026. It reverts to $3.00 / $15.00 after that, which changes every calculation below.
Prices last verified July 10, 2026, from the OpenRouter models API snapshot, cross-checked against Anthropic's published rates.
Two things the grid hides. First, older builds do not cost more. Claude Opus pricing holds at $5 / $25 across 4.8, 4.7, and 4.6, and Sonnet 4.6 stays at $3 / $15. Legacy Opus 4.1 and Opus 4 are still $15 / $75, so pin a model version before you budget. Second, the context window cost is flat. Only Haiku is a 200K-context model; every current Opus, Sonnet, and Fable model carries a 1M-token window at standard rates, with no long-context surcharge.
Opus vs Sonnet vs Haiku: cost per real workload
A per-token rate tells you nothing until you multiply it by a job. So we did, on three real workloads at July 10, 2026 prices. Plug your own token volumes into the same formula: (input tokens ÷ 1M × input rate) + (output tokens ÷ 1M × output rate).
| Workload | Haiku 4.5 | Sonnet 5 | Opus 4.8 |
|---|---|---|---|
| RAG chatbot, 3K in / 500 out, per 1,000 requests | $5.50 | $11.00 | $27.50 |
| Doc summarization, 50K in / 1.5K out, per 100 docs | $5.75 | $11.50 | $28.75 |
| Coding agent, 200K in / 20K out, per task | $0.30 | $0.60 | $1.50 |
The gap is wider than the headline rates suggest. Opus 4.8 runs 5x the Haiku bill on the chatbot job because output dominates, and Opus output is $25 against Haiku's $5. On the coding-agent run the spread narrows in absolute dollars ($1.50 vs $0.30) but the ratio holds. The practical read: route bulk classification, tagging, and extraction to Haiku, keep Sonnet 5 for the middle, and reserve Opus 4.8 for the tasks where a wrong answer costs more than the token premium. That is the token calculator no leaderboard publishes: score per dollar, not score alone.
Route by cost of error: Opus 4.8 ($5/$25), Sonnet 5 ($2/$10), Haiku 4.5 ($1/$5) per 1M tokens; reuse a fixed prefix and prompt caching reads at 1/10 the input rate. Prices verified July 10, 2026.
Prompt caching: how much it actually saves
Prompt caching is the biggest lever on the Claude API bill, and most price tables omit it. Reusing a cached prefix costs one-tenth of the input rate. On Opus 4.8 a cached read is $0.50 per million against $5.00 uncached, a 90% cut per token. The catch: writing to cache costs 1.25x input ($6.25 on Opus). So it pays off from the second use, not the first.
Worked example. An agent reuses a 100K-token context prefix across 20 turns on Opus 4.8. Uncached, that is 2M input tokens, or $10.00. Cached, you write the prefix once ($0.63) and read it 19 times ($0.95), for $1.58. Same work, 84% less on input. The more you reuse a fixed prefix, the closer the saving climbs to the full 90%.
Prompt caching discounts stack with one more lever. Batch API discounts are separate and simpler: asynchronous jobs run at 50% of standard token prices, with no caching setup. For overnight bulk work, that is the easier saving to capture.
Claude API vs Claude Max subscription
The API and the subscription are different products for different buyers. The API is usage-based and uncapped, with rate limits that climb through spend-based API tiers. The subscriptions (Pro at $20 per month, Max at $100 to $200) are capped chat access with no per-token bill and no token meter you can plan against.
That last part is the recurring complaint from heavy users. One r/ClaudeAI open letter put it plainly: "There's no real-time token counter. No published token budgets. No way to plan." A separate post that reached 877 upvotes, on the weekly Opus caps, summed the frustration as "The math ain't mathing." The pattern: prosumers who moved from ChatGPT admit "we have ZERO knowledge about 'tokens'" (1,809 upvotes) and then hit invisible caps they cannot forecast.
The API flips that. Every token is metered and priced, so a product's cost is predictable to the cent, which is exactly why builders use it. The subscription wins for one person chatting until the caps bite. If you are shipping software, running an agent, or batching work, the API's transparency is the point, and the workload tables above are your budget.
Claude vs GPT-5 API cost for the same job
Claude is rarely the cheapest option for a given job, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Priced on the identical chatbot workload (3K in / 500 out, per 1,000 requests), here is where the current flagships land at July 10, 2026 rates.
| Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Cost per 1,000 requests |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 2.5 Flash | $0.30 | $2.50 | $2.15 |
| GPT-5-mini | $0.25 | $2.00 | $1.75 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 | $5.00 | $5.50 |
| GPT-5 | $1.25 | $10.00 | $8.75 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2.00* | $10.00* | $11.00 |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $5.00 | $25.00 | $27.50 |
GPT-5 ($8.75) undercuts Sonnet 5 ($11.00) on this mix, and GPT-5-mini ($1.75) beats Haiku ($5.50). For the cheapest model for production on raw price, GPT-5-mini and Gemini 2.5 Flash win outright; Gemini Flash pricing ($0.30/$2.50) is the budget floor here. Claude 's counterweight is the 1M-context window across Sonnet, Opus, and Fable, against GPT-5's 400K, plus the coding and long-horizon quality that our Claude vs ChatGPT breakdown tests task by task. Decide on quality per dollar for your job, not the sticker rate. Full OpenAI API pricing sits on its own page.
How we keep this priced list fresh
The numbers on this page come from our OpenRouter live pricing feed, the OpenRouter models API, which aggregates per-token rates across providers, then cross-checked against Anthropic's published pricing. The snapshot behind this update was fetched July 10, 2026, which is the dateModified on our pricing Dataset. When Anthropic ships a new model or the Sonnet 5 introductory rate expires on August 31, 2026, this table gets re-pulled and re-dated. How that live feed works, and where the markup sits, is in our OpenRouter review .