Claude API Pricing 2026

As of October 10, 2026, Anthropic lists per-million-token prices of $0.10 input / $0.50 output for Claude Haiku 5.5 (prompts up to 100K tokens; $0.50/$2.50 above), $2/$10 for Sonnet 5.5, $4/$20 for Opus 5.5, and $10/$50 for Fable 5.1. Older models are still offered: Opus 5 and Opus 4.5–4.8 at $5/$25, Sonnet 4.5–4.6 at $3/$15, and Haiku 4.5 at $1/$5.

At Claude Sonnet 5.5 rates ($2 input / $10 output per million tokens): 10M input tokens cost $20.00 and 10M output tokens cost $100.00. A month of 10M tokens split 8M input and 2M output costs $16.00 + $20.00 = $36.00 before caching or batch discounts.

The Batch API processes requests asynchronously at 50% off input and output rates. Haiku 5.5 drops to $0.05/$0.25 per million tokens (prompts up to 100K), Sonnet 5.5 to $1/$5, Opus 5.5 to $2/$10, and Fable 5.1 to $5/$25. It suits offline workloads with no latency requirement.

A 5-minute cache write costs 1.25x the base input price and a 1-hour write costs 2x. Cache reads cost 0.1x base input on most models, 0.05x on Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5, and 0.025x on Fable 5.1. For Sonnet 5.5 that is $2.50/M (5-minute write), $4/M (1-hour write) and $0.10/M per cache read, versus $2/M standard input.

Yes. Anthropic is the company and Claude is its model family, so the Anthropic API and the Claude API are the same service, accessed at api.anthropic.com with a key from the Claude Console.

The Claude API uses pay-as-you-go token pricing. You are billed separately for input tokens (text, images or documents you send) and output tokens (what Claude generates). Prices vary by model, from $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens for Haiku 5.5 to $10/$50 for Fable 5.1. Server-side tools add their own fees, such as $10 per 1,000 web searches. Enterprise volume pricing is negotiated with Anthropic sales.

Claude Haiku 5.5 is the cheapest current model at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens ($0.50/$2.50 above that). Sonnet 5.5 at $2/$10 is the middle option, and Opus 5.5 at $4/$20 is the cheapest Opus-class model Anthropic has listed.

Image inputs are converted to tokens using the formula (width px × height px) / 750, so a 1,000×1,000 pixel image uses about 1,334 tokens. At Sonnet 5.5's $2 per million input tokens that is about $0.0027 per image, or roughly $2,668 of input tokens for one million images before output tokens.

Volume discounts are available through the Enterprise tier, which is custom-quoted. There is no published discount schedule for standard pay-as-you-go API customers. The primary cost-reduction levers available without a custom contract are choosing lower-cost model tiers (Haiku, Sonnet) and implementing prompt caching for repeated contexts.

Developers with enough volume report that self-hosting open-weight models can be much cheaper than the Claude API. One developer (Reddit, April 2025) processed 4.5 billion tokens over 14 days for $280 on their own infrastructure and estimated the same workload at $15,000 on Claude at the then-current Sonnet rate of $3/$15 per million tokens. Self-hosting adds engineering overhead and may lose quality on complex tasks.