Claude Sonnet 4.6
How much does Claude Sonnet 4.6 cost?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3.00 per million input tokens and $15.00 per million output tokens on Anthropic's own API. Input read from the prompt cache costs $0.30 per million tokens. Checked against Anthropic's pricing page on October 12, 2026.
- Input Price
- $3.00
- per 1M tokens
- Output Price
- $15.00
- per 1M tokens
- Context Window
- 1.0M
- tokens
- Speed Score
- 86
- out of 100
Benchmarks
Avg 90/100- Coding91/100
- Reasoning90/100
- Extraction91/100
- Creative90/100
- Vision88/100
Pricing
Input
Prompt / context tokens
$3.00/ 1M
Output
Generated tokens
$15.00/ 1M
Batch API
Async processing discount
$1.50 / $7.50
50% off standard price
List price from the Anthropic pricing page, verified October 12, 2026.
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.
Check the sourceBest For
Claude Sonnet 4.6 in context
On a typical 70% input / 30% output mix, Claude Sonnet 4.6 blends to $6.60 per million tokens. That puts it above 74% of the 46 models tracked here, and 15 other models in the same mid-range tier undercut it. Tier is a capability label, not a price band — the spread inside one tier is often wider than the gap between tiers, which is why picking by tier alone tends to overspend.
Input runs $3.00 per million and output $15.00 — a 5.0x ratio. That ratio matters more than either number on its own: a summarisation or classification workload reads far more than it writes and will track the input price, while a code-generation or long-form writing workload inverts that and will track the output price. Compare models on the ratio your own traffic actually has, not on the input price alone.
The benchmark profile is unusually flat — coding leads at 91/100 but only 3 points separate the strongest category from the weakest. That makes Claude Sonnet 4.6 a safe default for mixed workloads where you cannot predict in advance which capability a request will lean on, and a poor choice if you need a specialist.
The context window is 1M tokens and the throughput score is 86/100. Context only earns its keep if you fill it, and filling it is also what makes a request expensive — a large window is an option, not a discount. For a mid-range-tier model, judge the speed score against what you are doing: it decides everything for interactive chat and almost nothing for overnight batch work.
Worth checking before you commit: Claude Haiku 5.5 scores at least as well on combined coding and reasoning and blends to $0.22 per million against Claude Sonnet 4.6's $6.60. That does not make Claude Sonnet 4.6 the wrong choice — context window, latency, vendor lock-in, and specific capabilities all sit outside a benchmark score — but it does mean the price difference needs a reason behind it.
The closest comparison is o3-mini from OpenAI, at $2.09 per million against $6.60. 7 models in this tier score higher on combined coding and reasoning, which is the useful framing: the question is rarely whether a model is good, it is whether it is the cheapest thing that is good enough for the specific work you are sending it.
What it costs in production
At 10M + 2M tokens a month — a realistic mid-size production workload — Claude Sonnet 4.6 runs about $60.00. Routing the latency-tolerant share through the batch API at 50% off would bring that to roughly $30.00, which is usually a bigger saving than switching models.
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 Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|
| List price (input / output) | $3.00 / $15.00 |
| Cached input | $0.3010% of the input price |
| Batch API | 50% off input and output |
| Long prompts | No surcharge across the 1M window |
| Input with 80% cache hits | $0.84 |
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.
Price History
No price changes since launch
Strengths
- Still on the previous Claude tokenizer: the same text is about 30% fewer tokens than on Sonnet 5.x
- 1M context billed at the standard rate
- 50% Batch API discount ($1.50 / $7.50)
Avoid For
- Most new builds — Sonnet 5.5 lists at $2 / $10 and still costs less for the same text after the tokenizer difference