Prices per 1M tokens Claude Opus 5.5 Claude Opus 5
Cache reads $0.20 $0.50
Input tokens $4 $5
Output tokens $20 $25
Cache writes $5 $6.25
Opus 5 is the model with highest spend on openrouter (<a href="https://openrouter.ai/rankings#task-spend" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/rankings#task-spend) and it seems plausible that Opus 5 is/was the highest spend model in the world, and certainly Anthropic's biggest moneymaker.
If you are forced to reduce price despite raising capabilities, that certainly tells something about the market, and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too, since this model is their biggest topline contributor
> Fable tends not to perform better, just cost more.
There are old wives' tales on how the original Fable was superb and the stuff of legend,but it as it was leaps and bounds beyond what other models were being offered then Anthropic opted replace it with a neutered version under the same name.
So today everyone can pay to use Fable, but legend has it they are paying for a nerfed replacement released under the same name.
We haven’t been able to use opus as much as we’d want because it’s been too expensive for general use, price drop is good so I can stop juggling different models and just use this daily unless it has some weird new issues
Unfortunately, they're full of it <a href="https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5#token-use" rel="nofollow">https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5#token-u...
It does work out to be a similar cost per task though
so don't use it at max? The benchmarks suggest that high/xhigh are more than sufficient to be ahead and a whole magnitude below max with regards to token usage. I'd treat that as an outlier and not how verbose the model is in general (QED I know)
5.5 is higher for max effort, slightly higher for xhigh and lower for high, medium and low effort.
The biggest proportional difference seems to be at max (5.5 is 38% more) and at high (5.5 is 21% less).
I think most people run at high and xhigh. At xhigh it is close enough to be task dependent and I don't think most people will notice. At high effort I think it looks like it will be an improvement for most people.
5.5 Max should probably be compared to Fable - it performs a lot better than 5 Max.
parent means that they could get more client / a larger part of the market, which would lead to more income (more tokens) despite lower marginal prices
Happened to be testing a "review patches on a mailing list" harness I was developing; here are a sample of the latest results, testing 12 patches containing a total of 14 issues:
Opus 5.5: Found 8/14 issues. Total cost: $15.40
Fable 5.1: Found 7/14 issues. Total cost: $66.34
Opus 5: Found 6/14 issues. Total cost: $15.19
Sonnet 5: Found 2/14 issues. Total cost: $19.15
This is a relatively small sample size, but it was both the best and the cheapest.
ETA: NB this is "Equivalent API" cost as reported by claude's CLI; I was using my subscription.
I just told Opus 5.5 "Perform a code review on the current branch" to see what it would come up with. The results were not inspiring. It told me there were five issues, one of which was a test-coverage gap on line 848 of ProjectTemplateTests.cs. But ProjectTemplateTests.cs is only 160 lines long.
I told it that it had made a mistake in the line number, and to double-check all the line numbers. It responded "You were right to push on this: four of the five line numbers were wrong, and while checking them I found two findings that were overstated."
Then I noticed in the corner of the Claude CLI UI that it was showing "Effort: medium". I'm pretty sure I had set it to high effort before; I don't know when it reverted to medium, but that's another thing that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
I'll try again on high effort to see if it does better, but so far I am not impressed with Opus 5.5 on my first day of using it.
My prompts are moving in the other direction as sashiko [1], a managed pipeline developed for the Linux Kernel mailing list like a year ago. But last year's models needed a lot more structure and guidance; the results I posted are from the "single prompt" version of the same thing. The README [2] describes the difference. You can browse the contents to get an idea; basically all the prompts were actually written and iterated by Fable (and now Opus 5.5), seeing how agents failed the tests and improving them.
Good data and goes to show that Fable is melting the GPUs and is priced accordingly. I'd guess that cost to serve for Opus 5.5 is meaningfully lower through architecture advances
UPDATE: Sorry, just noticed I typed in the Opus 5 total cost wrong -- it should be $58.19. Main point "best and cheapest" was from the actual numbers, not my typo.
That analogy doesn't hold; at least w bits vs bytes it's still "data over time".
In this case it's measuring something nearly meaningless. You could charge 100 times less per token, but if task completion takes 1,000 times as many tokens, it's not much of a bargain.
> Cache hits and refreshes on Claude Opus 5.5 are priced at 0.05x the base input price.
If they do the same for Haiku and Sonnet 5.5 then we should also see 5c/mtok and 10c/mtok cache read for those models, respectively. Still too high for Haiku IMO, Luna is 2c/mtok.
Claude adapts to OpenAI’s surprising move to simply deliver better performance than Fable 5.1, better tools as well as featuring very low pricing.
Fable 5.1 literally was a money grabber. While I liked the results, tokens were burned so hard it was embarrassing, while Astra seemed to not care.
Also Claude makes it very hard to pay for additional token budgets, allowing only credit cards. I don’t use mine anymore since I don’t need it in everyday life I was dumbfounded.
So Anthropic is just copying OpenAI so to say, matching them and essentially with Opus 5.5 being Fable 5.1 in disguise, all they do is reduce costs.
>and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too
have they ever shared anything about their revenue mix between consumer plans vs per-token billing? this is a revenue cut on their API billing, but they're not saying anything about increased limits on the plans. so all the plan revenue just got more profitable.
It's the Chinese open source models. They're barely behind the frontier, making AI a commodity, forcing openAI and Anthropic's margins downward.
I'm hardly a fan of China/Xi, but I do appreciate and benefit from this.
China doesn't care about money. Imagine a world where it's globally normalized to ask a Chinese LLM who to vote for, what happened in Hongkong, about the Uigurs, or if Taiwan is a country.
They will burn as much money as necessary to make that happen. And they have a virtually infinite amount of liquidity.
This is one explanation. However, if Xi Jinping believes that whoever reaches superintelligence first becomes the next global hegemon, doing this (and more, cough cough Taiwan) suddenly looks very sane solely as a way to kneecap the competition.
The goodwill/propaganda are convenient, sure, but my guess is that they aren't the primary motivation. Another possibility is that if no takeoff happens, pressuring OpenAI/Anthropic on profitability would exacerbate the damage overinvestment has done to the US stock market/economy.
The service is the value, not the model unto itself. This is where nearly all of HN is somehow entirely blind.
Capturing the users is the ad network, that's Google and OpenAI. Capturing corporate trust at a reasonable API cost, that's Anthropic's direction.
China has none of that and they never will for exactly the same reason Baidu is irrelevant globally despite being a highly capable search engine. 'Search' is also a commodity, that's not the value that Google brings to the table.
It's a search engine, anybody can build a search engine = that's what you just said.
Search is different as a service provided for free. When cost isn't in the picture, trust/convenience win.
But two products that provide essentially the same benefit, and one is significantly cheaper? Corporations maximize profit, my friend. What the model has to say about Tianammmen Square doesn't matter when we're using it to write code.
These companies are posting massive losses while also lowering prices. This sounds just like the Chinese bikeshare bubble where they were all taking massive losses in hopes that their competitor would go broke first.
In the end, everyone lost and there are millions of bikes in landfills.
If you're interested in the bikeshare bubble, Asianometry did a video on it a while ago.
I disagree - Fable melts the GPUs and they have a high incentive to move people off of that. If they have meaningfully decreased cost to serve on Opus 5.5, they can reduce prices and increase margin or at least turn off the most expensive compute.
GodelNumbering · · focus · HN ↗
If you are forced to reduce price despite raising capabilities, that certainly tells something about the market, and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too, since this model is their biggest topline contributor
alvis · · focus · HN ↗
blfr · · focus · HN ↗
rapfaria · · focus · HN ↗
If 5.5 is any better, I might try to do agentic-assisted development instead of just telling fable to delegate
neuronexmachina · · focus · HN ↗
herpdyderp · · focus · HN ↗
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locknitpicker · · focus · HN ↗
There are old wives' tales on how the original Fable was superb and the stuff of legend,but it as it was leaps and bounds beyond what other models were being offered then Anthropic opted replace it with a neutered version under the same name.
So today everyone can pay to use Fable, but legend has it they are paying for a nerfed replacement released under the same name.
coffeebeqn · · focus · HN ↗
AJ007 · · focus · HN ↗
mcintyre1994 · · focus · HN ↗
drbscl · · focus · HN ↗
It does work out to be a similar cost per task though
jsnell · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5#intelligence-comparisons" rel="nofollow">https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5#intelli...
It is most of the pareto frontier.
drbscl · · focus · HN ↗
93po · · focus · HN ↗
persedes · · focus · HN ↗
drbscl · · focus · HN ↗
persedes · · focus · HN ↗
naasking · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5?models=claude-opus-5-5-high%2Cclaude-opus-5-high#token-use" rel="nofollow">https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5?models=...
piotrdz · · focus · HN ↗
johnbellone · · focus · HN ↗
epolanski · · focus · HN ↗
piotrdz · · focus · HN ↗
piotrdz · · focus · HN ↗
nl · · focus · HN ↗
The biggest proportional difference seems to be at max (5.5 is 38% more) and at high (5.5 is 21% less).
I think most people run at high and xhigh. At xhigh it is close enough to be task dependent and I don't think most people will notice. At high effort I think it looks like it will be an improvement for most people.
5.5 Max should probably be compared to Fable - it performs a lot better than 5 Max.
<a href="https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5?models=claude-opus-5-5%2Cclaude-opus-5-5-xhigh%2Cclaude-opus-5-5-high%2Cclaude-opus-5%2Cclaude-opus-5-xhigh%2Cclaude-opus-5-high%2Cclaude-opus-5-5-medium%2Cclaude-opus-5-5-low%2Cclaude-opus-5-medium%2Cclaude-opus-5-low#intelligence-index-token-use-tabs" rel="nofollow">https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5?models=...
make3 · · focus · HN ↗
meerita · · focus · HN ↗
gwd · · focus · HN ↗
Opus 5.5: Found 8/14 issues. Total cost: $15.40
Fable 5.1: Found 7/14 issues. Total cost: $66.34
Opus 5: Found 6/14 issues. Total cost: $15.19
Sonnet 5: Found 2/14 issues. Total cost: $19.15
This is a relatively small sample size, but it was both the best and the cheapest.
ETA: NB this is "Equivalent API" cost as reported by claude's CLI; I was using my subscription.
retinaros · · focus · HN ↗
roflc0ptic · · focus · HN ↗
I was surprised how much worse Astra did on correctness; I stopped testing with it. Gonna try sol and Luna but low confidence
rmunn · · focus · HN ↗
I told it that it had made a mistake in the line number, and to double-check all the line numbers. It responded "You were right to push on this: four of the five line numbers were wrong, and while checking them I found two findings that were overstated."
Then I noticed in the corner of the Claude CLI UI that it was showing "Effort: medium". I'm pretty sure I had set it to high effort before; I don't know when it reverted to medium, but that's another thing that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
I'll try again on high effort to see if it does better, but so far I am not impressed with Opus 5.5 on my first day of using it.
gwd · · focus · HN ↗
[1] <a href="https://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko
[2] <a href="https://gitlab.com/xen-project/people/gdunlap/xen-review-prompts" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/xen-project/people/gdunlap/xen-review-pro...
kphorn · · focus · HN ↗
gwd · · focus · HN ↗
rahimnathwani · · focus · HN ↗
chrisweekly · · focus · HN ↗
cute_boi · · focus · HN ↗
chrisweekly · · focus · HN ↗
In this case it's measuring something nearly meaningless. You could charge 100 times less per token, but if task completion takes 1,000 times as many tokens, it's not much of a bargain.
Shekelphile · · focus · HN ↗
> Cache hits and refreshes on Claude Opus 5.5 are priced at 0.05x the base input price.
If they do the same for Haiku and Sonnet 5.5 then we should also see 5c/mtok and 10c/mtok cache read for those models, respectively. Still too high for Haiku IMO, Luna is 2c/mtok.
brookst · · focus · HN ↗
artursapek · · focus · HN ↗
andxor · · focus · HN ↗
_the_inflator · · focus · HN ↗
Fable 5.1 literally was a money grabber. While I liked the results, tokens were burned so hard it was embarrassing, while Astra seemed to not care.
Also Claude makes it very hard to pay for additional token budgets, allowing only credit cards. I don’t use mine anymore since I don’t need it in everyday life I was dumbfounded.
So Anthropic is just copying OpenAI so to say, matching them and essentially with Opus 5.5 being Fable 5.1 in disguise, all they do is reduce costs.
Competition works.
notatoad · · focus · HN ↗
have they ever shared anything about their revenue mix between consumer plans vs per-token billing? this is a revenue cut on their API billing, but they're not saying anything about increased limits on the plans. so all the plan revenue just got more profitable.
forgot-my-pw · · focus · HN ↗
margorczynski · · focus · HN ↗
It doesn't look like that's happening, on the contrary the prices are falling especially when taking into account capabilities.
johnecheck · · focus · HN ↗
I'm hardly a fan of China/Xi, but I do appreciate and benefit from this.
bulbar · · focus · HN ↗
They will burn as much money as necessary to make that happen. And they have a virtually infinite amount of liquidity.
epolanski · · focus · HN ↗
There's only 12 countries that do on the planet, the most relevant of them being Guatemala.
bulbar · · focus · HN ↗
For political reason, yes. Taiwan is a country though.
johnecheck · · focus · HN ↗
The goodwill/propaganda are convenient, sure, but my guess is that they aren't the primary motivation. Another possibility is that if no takeoff happens, pressuring OpenAI/Anthropic on profitability would exacerbate the damage overinvestment has done to the US stock market/economy.
adventured · · focus · HN ↗
Capturing the users is the ad network, that's Google and OpenAI. Capturing corporate trust at a reasonable API cost, that's Anthropic's direction.
China has none of that and they never will for exactly the same reason Baidu is irrelevant globally despite being a highly capable search engine. 'Search' is also a commodity, that's not the value that Google brings to the table.
It's a search engine, anybody can build a search engine = that's what you just said.
johnecheck · · focus · HN ↗
But two products that provide essentially the same benefit, and one is significantly cheaper? Corporations maximize profit, my friend. What the model has to say about Tianammmen Square doesn't matter when we're using it to write code.
dboreham · · focus · HN ↗
hajile · · focus · HN ↗
In the end, everyone lost and there are millions of bikes in landfills.
If you're interested in the bikeshare bubble, Asianometry did a video on it a while ago.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQrEDq8KPiU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQrEDq8KPiU
adventured · · focus · HN ↗
The notion of comparing this to Chinese bikesharing is comically absurd.
rvz · · focus · HN ↗
"Allegedly".
Plus with a lot of accounting tricks, and this not being recurring to make their books look nice for the eventual IPO.
filoeleven · · focus · HN ↗
DonHopkins · · focus · HN ↗
MayeulC · · focus · HN ↗
runtime_terror · · focus · HN ↗
kphorn · · focus · HN ↗
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