Cost and performance comparison
Claude 3 Opus vs Claude Opus 5.5
Model AAnthropic
Claude 3 Opus
- Cost / 1M Tokens
- $33.00
- 70% in · 30% out mix
- ≈ $36.30 for the same text, tokenizer included
- Value Index (score÷cost)
- 2.5
- Higher = better value
- Speed
- 50/100
- Context
- 200K
- Tier
- Power Tier
Last list price before the model was retired.
Its tokenizer produces about 10% more tokens than OpenAI's for the same text, so the real cost runs higher than the list price suggests. This is an estimate: the tokenizer has not been measured yet.
Model BAnthropic
Claude Opus 5.5
- Cost / 1M Tokens
- $8.80
- 70% in · 30% out mix
- ≈ $12.58 for the same text, tokenizer included
- Value Index (score÷cost)
- 7.9
- Higher = better value
- Speed
- 66/100
- Context
- 1.0M
- Tier
- Power Tier
List price from the Anthropic pricing page, verified October 12, 2026.
Its tokenizer produces about 43% more tokens than OpenAI's for the same text, so the real cost runs higher than the list price suggests. This is an estimate: the tokenizer has not been measured yet.
Check the sourceIn-depth analysis
Claude 3 Opus vs Claude Opus 5.5: Detailed Comparison
Claude 3 Opus is Anthropic's flagship-tier language model with a 200K-token context window, excelling at reasoning. Claude Opus 5.5 from Anthropic is a flagship-tier model supporting 1.0M tokens in context, with standout performance in coding.
Claude Opus 5.5 is both the cheaper and the stronger model here — for the same text it costs 65% less than Claude 3 Opus and still leads on combined coding and reasoning by 28 points. There is no tradeoff to weigh on this pair: unless you need something specific from Claude 3 Opus, the cheaper model is simply the better one. Claude 3 Opus is priced at $15.00/M input tokens and $75.00/M output tokens. Claude Opus 5.5 costs $4.00/M input and $20.00/M output.
Claude Opus 5.5 turns the same text into about 30% more tokens than Claude 3 Opus, because their tokenizers differ — so comparing list prices per token understates what Claude Opus 5.5 costs. For the same text, split 70% input and 30% output and counted the way OpenAI's tokenizer counts it, Claude Opus 5.5 works out at about $12.58 per million tokens and Claude 3 Opus at $36.30. Every cost figure on this page includes that difference.
On iOPTERA's editorial scores, Claude Opus 5.5 leads with 99/100 for coding and 99/100 for reasoning, against Claude 3 Opus's 80/100 and 90/100.
Capability breakdown
Across the five core benchmark categories, here is how Claude 3 Opus and Claude Opus 5.5 stack up head to head:
Best model by task
- coding: Claude Opus 5.5 wins with 99/100
- reasoning: Claude Opus 5.5 wins with 99/100
- data extraction: Claude Opus 5.5 wins with 97/100
- creative tasks: Claude Opus 5.5 wins with 97/100
- vision/multimodal: Claude Opus 5.5 wins with 96/100
Estimated monthly cost at scale
For 10M + 2M tokens of text a month (counted the way OpenAI's tokenizer counts), Claude 3 Opus runs about $330.00 while Claude Opus 5.5 runs about $114.40 — Claude Opus 5.5 saves roughly $215.60 (65%) every month.
What actually decides it
Both models come from Anthropic, so they share a tokenizer, an API surface, and a billing account. Switching between them is a model-string change and nothing else — no new SDK, no re-tokenizing your prompts to re-estimate cost, no second vendor to onboard. That makes routing between them far cheaper to implement than a cross-vendor split.
These are the same lab's model at the same tier, 30 months apart — so this is an upgrade question, not a choice between alternatives. Claude Opus 5.5 is the current entry; Claude 3 Opus is here because plenty of production traffic still runs on it. If you are starting something new there is little reason to pick the older one, and if you are already on it the question is whether the migration cost is worth the gain.
The context gap is the largest single difference on this pair: Claude Opus 5.5 takes 1.0M tokens against 200K for Claude 3 Opus, roughly 5.0x. That is the difference between feeding in a whole repository or a full contract set and having to chunk it. If your work involves documents you cannot split cleanly, this decides it on its own.
Latency separates them: Claude Opus 5.5 scores 66/100 against 50/100 for Claude 3 Opus, a 16-point gap. That matters for anything a person waits on — chat, autocomplete, interactive tools. For batch and background work it does not, and trading latency for capability there is usually the right call.
One practical asymmetry: Claude Opus 5.5 offers a batch API at 50% off standard rates, and Claude 3 Opus does not. For anything that does not need an answer immediately — nightly enrichment, backfills, evaluation runs — that discount can be worth more than the difference in list price, and it is easy to overlook when comparing headline rates.
Claude Opus 5.5 wins this comparison outright — cheaper and stronger. Choose Claude 3 Opus only if it has a specific capability you need; on price and benchmarks it is behind on both.
What you actually pay
The list price is only the start. Prompt caching, batch processing and long prompts change the bill, and each provider sets them differently. Prices per 1M tokens.
| Pricing term | Claude 3 Opus | Claude Opus 5.5 |
|---|---|---|
| List price (input / output) | $15.00 / $75.00 | $4.00 / $20.00 |
| Cached input | — | $0.205% of the input price |
| Batch API | — | 50% off input and output |
| Long prompts | — | No surcharge across the 1M window |
| Input with 80% cache hits | — | $0.96 |
The last row assumes 80% of input tokens are read from the cache, as in a chat app that re-sends a long system prompt or RAG over the same documents. Cache-write and storage charges are not included.
Claude also bills cache writes: 1.25× the input price for a 5-minute cache, 2× for one hour.
Checked on October 8, 2026 against the pricing pages of Anthropic.
Capability scores
iOPTERA editorial scores across 5 categories — informed by public benchmarks, not measured by us
Coding
Reasoning
Extraction
Creative
Vision
Speed Score
Context Window
What Is a Token?
Models don't read words — they process tokens.
A token is roughly 4 characters of English text (~¾ of a word). Your API bill is priced per million tokens — understanding this directly reduces your costs.
Short phrase
"Hello, world!"
- Claude 3 Opus
- $6.60
- Claude Opus 5.5
- $2.29
Business email
One typical email (~200 words)
- Claude 3 Opus
- $445.50
- Claude Opus 5.5
- $154.44
Code file
50-line Python script
- Claude 3 Opus
- $660.00
- Claude Opus 5.5
- $228.80
Prices shown are for 100,000 runs of each workload — one run costs a fraction of a cent on both Claude 3 Opus and Claude Opus 5.5, so the number only becomes meaningful at production volume. Input tokens only; add your output volume in the calculator below.
How to check your token usage
response.usage.total_tokensEvery API response includes a usage object. Sum total_tokens across all calls to get your monthly figure, then use the calculator below.
Your Cost Calculator
Enter your actual monthly token usage to see real savings
Quick Presets
Claude 3 Opus
$1,089.00/mo
$13,068.00/yr
Claude Opus 5.5
$377.52/mo
$4,530.24/yr
Annual Savings
$8,537.76 saved per year
Claude Opus 5.5 cheaper · $711.48/mo
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