Claude Opus 5 API Pricing
Anthropic · context window 1M · prices updated 2026-09-15
Where Claude Opus 5 sits on price
At $25.00 per million output tokens, Claude Opus 5 is a frontier tier model — 12.0× the median output price of $2.08, which puts it in the most expensive 10% of everything we track. It sits 17th cheapest of the 27 Anthropic models we track. Output costs 5.0× input, the usual spread — trim both, starting with the answer length.
Cached input is 90% cheaper. On an input-heavy workload you need roughly a 28% cache-hit rate to take 25% off the input line — reachable for chatbots and agents that resend the same system prompt and history.
What real workloads cost on Claude Opus 5
These three workloads are the ones teams actually run on a frontier-priced model — a $25.00/1M model is not bought for the same job as one ten times the price.
| Workload | Per request | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| Small app — 1K requests/day (500 in / 150 out) The baseline most side projects actually run at. | $0.0063 | $188 |
| Coding agent — 300 sessions/day (60K in / 12K out) Multi-step loops re-read the same files; caching matters more than raw price. | $0.6 | $5400 |
| Support chatbot — 500 conversations/day (5K in / 1.4K out) Conversation history re-sent each turn — the classic prompt-caching win. | $0.06 | $900 |
Model your exact traffic in the API cost calculator — it preloads Claude Opus 5 with caching and batch options.
Claude Opus 5 price history
Claude Opus 5's price has not moved since we began tracking it on Aug 2, 2026 — 44 days of stability in a market where 78 of the 334 models we track have repriced over the same period. Anthropic's lineup has held steady across the board.
Change-points from our daily price snapshots (tracking since Aug 2, 2026; intraday moves between snapshots are not captured).
Claude Opus 5 vs GPT-6 Astra (batch)
The closest-priced alternative from another vendor is GPT-6 Astra (batch) (OpenAI) — priced within a rounding error on output, with identical input pricing. When two models land this close on price, the decision is quality on your own workload, not the price sheet: run 50 real requests through both and compare.
See GPT-6 Astra (batch) pricing →Cheaper alternatives
More Anthropic models
Frequently asked questions
› How much does the Claude Opus 5 API cost?
Claude Opus 5 costs $5.00 per million input tokens and $25.00 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.5 per million (90% cheaper). That works out to roughly 40,000 output tokens per dollar.
› What does the small app workload cost on Claude Opus 5?
Small app — 1K requests/day (500 in / 150 out) costs about $0.0063 per request and $188 per month on Claude Opus 5. The baseline most side projects actually run at.
› What does it cost to fill Claude Opus 5's 1M context window?
Sending 1M of input in a single request costs $5.00 at $5.00 per million tokens — before any output. With prompt caching that same fill drops to about $0.5 on repeat requests. This is why large context windows are cheap to advertise and expensive to actually use.
› Is Claude Opus 5 worth the price?
Claude Opus 5 is priced in the top bracket, at $25.00 per million output tokens. It only pays off where an error is expensive — production code, legal and medical drafting, agents that take real actions. For anything routine, Claude Sonnet 4.6 at $15.00 does the same job for a fraction of the bill.