Comment by GodelNumbering
6 hours ago
Finally that price drop
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 (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
It is only a price drop if price * tokens used is less
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.
They're claiming a drop in token use too, and that it nets to 40% cheaper.
Unfortunately, they're full of it https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5#token-u...
It does work out to be a similar cost per task though
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I tested it with Claude Code, and I can confirm it's way cheaper, better, faster and less verbose than Opus 5.
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
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.
Competition works.
People are paying for Opus 5? Not just burning down tokens left after they enjoyed Fable on the sub? Amazing.
My workplace doesn't even offer Fable. And on the sub, I've had a hard time understanding Opus 5, but Fable can deal with it with subagents.
If 5.5 is any better, I might try to do agentic-assisted development instead of just telling fable to delegate
Telling Fable to delegate is agentic development. At least I thought so until reading your comment.
When you need to disable data retention, you cannot use subscription plans.
We can’t use fable at work, opus and Astra are as good as it gets.
Enterprise and most Team accounts use API pricing, they don't have an included-usage quota.
Enterprise, and APIs
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
Speaking for myself, I have not been able to use Opus as much as I’d want because its verbose prose makes human reviews of its assumptions, architecture proposals etc. more painful than its predecessors. If they’ve solved that, I’ll be accelerating through my backlog that much faster, and using tokens accordingly.
Price per task (not per token) is what really matters.
Agree. But similar to how ISP use 200 mbps (bits) instead of 25 MBPS(bytes), i think this trend isn't going away.
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.
>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.
All the anti-AI people constantly say that any moment now the prices will skyrocket and in the end human work will be cheaper compared to using AI.
It doesn't look like that's happening, on the contrary the prices are falling especially when taking into account capabilities.
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.
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Footnote on their pricing page says:
> 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.
Since something like 98% of tokens are cache hits, that's a pretty substantial drop from 0.1x
6-Luna dropped it to 1c since you wrote this! :D
60% cache read is cool, but subscription only get 25% more according to Cat. I'm confused
I think gpt 5.6 family also dropped pricing but didn't give any more usage for the subscriptions. Maybe it's a way to silently lower the value given to subscriptions while keeping API pricing competitive
25% more usage sounds about right given the other token costs are down about 20%? I don't think cache read is a big portion of the overall cost.
Anything with long context quickly gets dominated by cache reads. Especially for interactive sessions I’ve got cache read % between 95% and 98%.
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> I don't think cache read is a big portion of the overall cost.
For long running tasks it is. That's what made Deepseek so cheap.
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source link please?
This is good. Probably to match GPT pricing, though frontier Claude models are still not as token efficient.
"Opus 5.5 requires less compute to serve than Opus 5, and its pricing reflects that."