Claude API pricing: what does Claude really cost in 2026?
Claude Opus 5, Sonnet 5 and Haiku 4.5 API pricing per million tokens, plus Claude Pro and Claude Max subscriptions — and how Claude compares to the competition on value.
Claude API pricing in 2026
Anthropic’s Claude line-up in 2026 spans three tiers, each priced per million tokens on the API.
Claude API prices
- Claude Opus 5 (frontier): $5 per 1M input tokens, $25 per 1M output tokens
- Claude Sonnet 5 (balanced): $2 per 1M input, $10 per 1M output
- Claude Haiku 4.5 (fast): $1 per 1M input, $5 per 1M output
Claude subscriptions
- Claude Free: $0
- Claude Pro: $20 / month
- Claude Max: $100 / month
Is Claude worth the premium?
Claude is often the go-to choice for coding and long-context work. It is rarely the cheapest option on the market, but for many developers the output quality justifies the price. The real question is how many tokens you get for your dollar — and that’s not a feature comparison, it’s arithmetic.
Pricing changes fast
Claude’s lineup and prices shift with each new release. The figures above are current as of this post; always check the last-verified date on the data you rely on.
Compare Claude’s tokens per dollar against every other provider in the AI intelligence calculator.