LLMCostLab

PricesCompare → Claude Sonnet 5 vs Gemini 3.1 Pro

Claude Sonnet 5 vs Gemini 3.1 Pro: API cost compared

Claude Sonnet 5 lists at $2.000 in / $10.00 out per 1M tokens. Gemini 3.1 Pro lists at $2.000 in / $12.00. Sticker price only tells you so much — below is what each actually costs across eight production workloads.

advertisement
Cheaper on more workloads
Claude Sonnet 5
wins 8 of 8
Blended rate gap
1.1x
at 3:1 in:out

Side by side

Claude Sonnet 5Gemini 3.1 Pro
ProviderAnthropicGoogle
Input per 1M$2.000$2.000
Output per 1M$10.00$12.00
Cached input per 1M$0.200not published
Context window200k1M
Blended per 1M (3:1)$4.000$4.500

Monthly cost by workload

Caching applied at each workload's typical hit rate. This is where the two models actually separate.

WorkloadClaude Sonnet 5Gemini 3.1 ProCheaperDifference
Customer support chatbot$257.80$390.00Claude Sonnet 5$132.20 (34%)
RAG document Q&A$368.00$464.00Claude Sonnet 5$96.00 (21%)
Coding agent$185.00$344.00Claude Sonnet 5$159.00 (46%)
Bulk summarization$2,692$2,880Claude Sonnet 5$188.00 (7%)
Structured data extraction$3,490$5,000Claude Sonnet 5$1,510 (30%)
Long-form content generation$429.20$520.00Claude Sonnet 5$90.80 (17%)
Email triage agent$805.00$1,360Claude Sonnet 5$555.00 (41%)
Translation pipeline$2,810$3,330Claude Sonnet 5$520.50 (16%)
advertisement

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 Sonnet 5 and 6.0 for Gemini 3.1 Pro. 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

Enter your own numbers, or start from a workload preset. Costs are monthly and update as you type.

Cheapest model
Cheapest → priciest spread
ModelIn /1MOut /1MMonthlyvs best