What Claude Opus 4 Actually Costs — And How It Stacks Up

Claude Opus 4 is available in three variants right now — claude-opus-4-6, claude-opus-4-7, and claude-opus-4-8 — and they're all priced identically: $5.00 per million tokens in, $25.00 per million tokens out. So if you're choosing between them, price isn't the deciding factor.

To put that in plain terms: a million output tokens is roughly 750,000 words, or about ten full-length novels. You'd pay $25 for that. Most real workloads are nowhere near that scale, so your actual bill stays pretty manageable.

If Opus feels steep, claude-sonnet-4-6 drops to $3.00 in and $15.00 out — 40% cheaper on both ends. That's a meaningful gap if you're running volume.

For comparison, gpt-5.5 costs the same on input ($5.00) but charges $30.00 per million tokens out — five bucks more than Opus 4 on the output side. Output is usually where costs pile up, so that difference adds up fast on chatty workloads.

If you want to go really lean, deepseek-v4-flash runs $0.14 in and $0.28 out — we're talking cents, not dollars. It's not Opus, but for high-volume, lower-stakes tasks, the savings are hard to ignore.