Prices → Compare → Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Sonnet 5
Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Sonnet 5: API cost compared
Claude Opus 5 lists at $5.000 in / $25.00 out per 1M tokens. Claude Sonnet 5 lists at $2.000 in / $10.00. Sticker price only tells you so much — below is what each actually costs across eight production workloads.
Side by side
| Claude Opus 5 | Claude Sonnet 5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Input per 1M | $5.000 | $2.000 |
| Output per 1M | $25.00 | $10.00 |
| Cached input per 1M | $0.500 | $0.200 |
| Context window | 200k | 200k |
| Blended per 1M (3:1) | $10.00 | $4.000 |
Monthly cost by workload
Caching applied at each workload's typical hit rate. This is where the two models actually separate.
| Workload | Claude Opus 5 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Cheaper | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer support chatbot | $644.50 | $257.80 | Claude Sonnet 5 | $386.70 (60%) |
| RAG document Q&A | $920.00 | $368.00 | Claude Sonnet 5 | $552.00 (60%) |
| Coding agent | $462.50 | $185.00 | Claude Sonnet 5 | $277.50 (60%) |
| Bulk summarization | $6,730 | $2,692 | Claude Sonnet 5 | $4,038 (60%) |
| Structured data extraction | $8,725 | $3,490 | Claude Sonnet 5 | $5,235 (60%) |
| Long-form content generation | $1,073 | $429.20 | Claude Sonnet 5 | $643.80 (60%) |
| Email triage agent | $2,012 | $805.00 | Claude Sonnet 5 | $1,207 (60%) |
| Translation pipeline | $7,024 | $2,810 | Claude Sonnet 5 | $4,214 (60%) |
How to read this
Claude Sonnet 5 is cheaper on the majority of these workloads, but "majority" is not the decision. The output:input price ratio is 5.0 for Claude Opus 5 and 5.0 for Claude Sonnet 5. If your traffic is output-heavy — long-form drafting, translation — the model with the lower output price wins regardless of what the input price suggests. If you are input-heavy — RAG, bulk summarization, agents re-reading a codebase — the cached input rate matters more than either headline number.
Cost is also not the only axis. This site does not benchmark quality, latency, or rate limits, and a model that is 3x cheaper but needs two attempts per task is not cheaper. Use these numbers to size a bill, then validate on your own evals.
Run your own numbers
Cost calculator
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| Model | In /1M | Out /1M | Monthly | vs best |
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