Claude Opus 4.6 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6: API price and specs

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 94% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6 on input price.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 94% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6 on output price.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 94% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6 on a 1M-in / 200k-out workload.

Field	Claude Opus 4.6	Claude Sonnet 4.6
Lowest input, per 1M	$2.50 +1566.7%	$0.15
Median input, per 1M	$5.00 +66.7%	$3.00
Lowest output, per 1M	$12.50 +1566.7%	$0.75
Median output, per 1M	$25.00 +66.7%	$15.00
Lowest unit price	—	$0.001 / request
Cost of 1M in + 200k out	$5.00 +1566.7%	$0.30
Context	1M	1M
Max output	128K	128K
Providers	31 +13.9%	36
Regions	AU, EU, GLOBAL, US	APAC, AU, EU, GLOBAL, JP, US
Accepts	application/pdf, file, image, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp, pdf, text	application/pdf, file, image, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp, pdf, text
Returns	text	text
Type	Text models	Text models
Free option	no	no
Cheapest provider	openrouter	daoxe

Your own workload: how many tokens the model gets (input) and gives back (output) - for example, in a month. The "Cost" row of the table above is recalculated for these numbers, for each model.

Computed from current offers each time the page opens; the best value of a row is bold, the percent is how far behind the best.

Providers selling both

abacus, aihubmix, aiml, amazon-bedrock, anthropic, azure, azure-cognitive-services, cometapi, cortecs, digitalocean, edenai, fastrouter, freemodel, google-vertex, google-vertex-anthropic, helicone, impossibl, jiekou, kilo, meganova, nearai, ofox, opencode, openrouter, orcarouter, perplexity-agent, poe, requesty, trustedrouter, vercel, zenmux

Frequently asked questions

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.6 or Claude Sonnet 4.6?

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 94% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6 on input price. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 94% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6 on output price. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 94% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6 on a 1M-in / 200k-out workload.

Which has the larger context, Claude Opus 4.6 or Claude Sonnet 4.6?

Claude Opus 4.6: 1M tokens; Claude Sonnet 4.6: 1M tokens.

Where can I use both Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6?