I don't understand how the K3 numbers keep coming out cheap for people. I recently started to add it to my security auditing benchmarks and found it was going to cost about twice as much as Opus 4.8. It blew through the $100 budget I'd set at like 11%. In the tasks I'm doing it seems crazy expensive because it chews so much, burning a tremendous amount of tokens.
I think the way people usually compare pricing is fundamentally flawed. You can't compare token prices because different models use different tokenizers, and you can't compare tokenizer-normalized token prices because different models at different settings use more or fewer tokens to complete the same task at a different level of quality.
Based on my entirely subjective experience, the $100 Moonshot plan using only K3 is comparable to the $200 Anthropic deal using the whole Fable allocation and Opus 4.8 for the rest.
Ask your doctor if Opus 5 is right for you. Side effects include occasional hallucination, security breaches and unwanted React apps. Some developers have reported receiving entire apps from untrained executives who may or may not know what they’re doing.
Stop using Opus immediately if you experience signs of dizziness or vomiting.
Vals Index Opus 4.8 > 5.0 goes from $2.90 to $8.54, for 4% gain ... That is a massive cost increase. Sure, 20% cheaper then Fable, but that is a 3x price increase compared to Opus 4.8 in that test.
Your numbers are for “max”. Opus 5.0 “max” is $2.03. Opus 5.0 “high” (competitive with Claude 4.8 “max” on that index) is $1.06, less than the $1.80 you are quoting for 4.8 max.
That the most expensive variant is expensive doesn’t really tell us much.
If you start to drop effort levels, you need to compare to the competition models. So GPT models on the same ~intelligence level, are then 50% cheaper.
You see the issue? Its still a expensive model, and from my understanding, it still uses the old tokenizer.
Going to be interesting to see when GPT 6 comes out (very soon).
It's definitely not cheaper than Sonnet on my benchmark, but it's cheaper than Fable and outperforms it. Which is big IMO. https://revise.io/errata-bench
The numbers from Anthropic seem heavily cherry-picked, Artificial Analysis has Opus 5 at 1.25x the cost of Sonnet and 2x the cost of GPT 5.6 and K3.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/?cost=cost-per-task
I don't understand how the K3 numbers keep coming out cheap for people. I recently started to add it to my security auditing benchmarks and found it was going to cost about twice as much as Opus 4.8. It blew through the $100 budget I'd set at like 11%. In the tasks I'm doing it seems crazy expensive because it chews so much, burning a tremendous amount of tokens.
I think the way people usually compare pricing is fundamentally flawed. You can't compare token prices because different models use different tokenizers, and you can't compare tokenizer-normalized token prices because different models at different settings use more or fewer tokens to complete the same task at a different level of quality.
Based on my entirely subjective experience, the $100 Moonshot plan using only K3 is comparable to the $200 Anthropic deal using the whole Fable allocation and Opus 4.8 for the rest.
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That's the sort of useful info I look for!
Testing at max effort likely doesn't produce optimal results.
Can you be more explicit?
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I feel like I am having a stroke. What is this
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I can't believe they released the charts they did.
It basically shows that Sol absolutely demolishes Fable at every part of the cost curve for coding for the same level of quality.
Opus is competitive. It just has a higher level of quality / higher cost to start.
Isn't that because Fable/Mythos were tuned for cyber at the expense of general performance?
I have no idea, but that would be weird considering Fable refuses to do anything within 10 miles of security.
If fable costs more to run than the markup they still come out ahead.
I can't help but read these comments in the voice of a TV commercial....
Ask your doctor if Opus 5 is right for you. Side effects include occasional hallucination, security breaches and unwanted React apps. Some developers have reported receiving entire apps from untrained executives who may or may not know what they’re doing.
Stop using Opus immediately if you experience signs of dizziness or vomiting.
Opus 5…the people’s favorite.
stares at codex "native" app that is actually react/electron [0]
[0] https://www.kitze.io/posts/codex-electron-app-technical-brea...
Spot on! Comment of the month, I'd say.
But … but … but 9 out of 10 doctors recommended Opus
> unwanted React apps
Treat like acne - target the Node and .pop() to eject
Also the cost per task.
https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/vals_index
!!! Vals !!!
Vals Index Opus 4.8 > 5.0 goes from $2.90 to $8.54, for 4% gain ... That is a massive cost increase. Sure, 20% cheaper then Fable, but that is a 3x price increase compared to Opus 4.8 in that test.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5 https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5#price-cos...
!!! artificial analysis !!
Cost per task is second highest, right below Fable.
* Fable: $2.75
* Opus 5.0: $2.03
* Opus 4.8: $1.80
* GPT 5.6 Sol: $1.04
* Kimi K3: $0.95
Looks like interest levels of cherry picked cost in their report. Cheaper model, clearly NOT. More expensive in both benchmarks.
Your numbers are for “max”. Opus 5.0 “max” is $2.03. Opus 5.0 “high” (competitive with Claude 4.8 “max” on that index) is $1.06, less than the $1.80 you are quoting for 4.8 max.
That the most expensive variant is expensive doesn’t really tell us much.
Same answer i gave to somebody else up here...
If you start to drop effort levels, you need to compare to the competition models. So GPT models on the same ~intelligence level, are then 50% cheaper.
You see the issue? Its still a expensive model, and from my understanding, it still uses the old tokenizer.
Going to be interesting to see when GPT 6 comes out (very soon).
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It's definitely not cheaper than Sonnet on my benchmark, but it's cheaper than Fable and outperforms it. Which is big IMO. https://revise.io/errata-bench
Opus 4.8 was already shown to be cheaper than Sonnet 5 when Sonnet 5 was released (by Anthropic)