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API price comparison: Claude vs GPT

Enter the average message size and how many messages you'll process. The table ranks every model from cheapest to most expensive for that volume.

Prices updated October 2026
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Examples

Price per million tokens

ModelInput /1MCached /1MOutput /1MContext
Claude Fable 5.1$10.00$0.25$50.001,000,000
Claude Opus 5.5$4.00$0.20$20.001,000,000
Claude Sonnet 5.5$2.00$0.20$10.001,000,000
Claude Haiku 4.5$1.00$0.10$5.00200,000
GPT-5.6 Sol$5.00$0.50$30.001,050,000
GPT-5.6 Terra$2.00$0.20$12.001,050,000
GPT-5.6 Luna$0.20$0.0200$1.201,050,000

How to choose

Price per token isn't the whole story: a pricier model may solve in one call what a cheap one needs three for, and tokenizers differ. Claude models from 4.7 on use a tokenizer that produces about 30% more tokens than the previous one; the token counter shows the difference.

  • High volume, simple tasks: GPT-5.6 Luna and Claude Haiku 4.5.
  • General product use (chat, support, RAG): Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-5.6 Terra.
  • Code, agents and long reasoning: Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-5.6 Sol.

Long context

Claude models from 4.6 on include a 1M-token context at standard pricing. On GPT-5.6, requests above 272K input tokens pay 2× input and 1.5× output for the whole request.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest AI API?

Per token, GPT-5.6 Luna ($0.20 input and $1.20 output per million). Among Claude models, Haiku 4.5.

Why is output more expensive?

Each output token needs a full forward pass of the model; input is processed in parallel and costs less.

Do the prices include tax?

No. They are public list prices in US dollars, before tax.

Estimate based on public prices as of October 2026. Token counts vary with the text and the model; check the official pricing page before you decide.