How much does the Anthropic Claude API cost?

As of June 2026, Claude API prices per million tokens are: Claude Opus 4.8, 4.7, and 4.6 at $5 input / $25 output; Claude Sonnet 4.6 at $3 input / $15 output; and Claude Haiku 4.5 at $1 input / $5 output. Prompt caching reads cost 10% of the input rate, and the Batch API gives a 50% discount on both input and output.

How much does prompt caching save on the Claude API?

A cache read costs 10% of the base input price (0.1x). Writing to the cache costs 1.25x the base input price for the 5-minute cache or 2x for the 1-hour cache. Caching pays off after a single read for the 5-minute duration, so for repeated system prompts or long documents it sharply reduces input cost.

Does the Claude API have a free tier?

There is no ongoing free tier. New users receive a small amount of free credits to test the API, after which usage is billed per token at the rates above. For free Claude access, use the Claude consumer app's free tier instead of the API.

Anthropic API pricing (2026): the Claude per-token cost table

Q: What is the cheapest Claude API model?

Claude Haiku 4.5 is the cheapest current Claude model at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens. You can cut that further: a prompt-cache read costs $0.10 per million tokens (10% of input), and the Batch API halves both input and output to $0.50 / $2.50 per million. For even lower cost on simple tasks, Google's Gemini Flash tier undercuts Haiku.

Short answer: Per million tokens, the Claude API costs $5 in / $25 out for Opus (4.8, 4.7, and 4.6), $3 in / $15 out for Sonnet 4.6, and $1 in / $5 out for Haiku 4.5 — the cheapest current model. A prompt-cache read costs 10% of the input rate, and the Batch API takes 50% off both input and output. Verified against Anthropic's official pricing page, June 2026.

Claude API model pricing (per 1M tokens)

Model	Input	Output	Best for
Claude Opus 4.8 (latest)	$5	$25	Hardest reasoning, agentic and critical work
Claude Opus 4.7 / 4.6	$5	$25	Same price as 4.8; prior Opus releases
Claude Sonnet 4.6	$3	$15	Production default; best quality-to-cost balance
Claude Haiku 4.5 (cheapest)	$1	$5	Routing, classification, high-volume simple tasks

Prices are USD per million tokens (MTok) for the first-party Claude API with default global routing. Opus 4.8, 4.7, 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 include the full 1M-token context window at standard per-token pricing. Older models (Opus 4.1 and earlier, at the legacy $15/$75 Opus rate) are deprecated.

What is the cheapest Claude API model?

Haiku 4.5, at $1 / $5 per million tokens, is the cheapest current Claude model. You can push the effective cost lower in three ways, which stack:

Prompt caching: a cache read is 0.1x input — $0.10 per million tokens on Haiku.
Batch API: 50% off both directions — $0.50 in / $2.50 out per million.
Right-sizing: route easy requests to Haiku and reserve Opus for genuinely hard reasoning.

If you need to go cheaper than Haiku for trivial tasks, Google's Gemini Flash tier undercuts it — see OpenAI & Claude API alternatives.

Prompt caching and Batch API discounts

Feature	Multiplier vs base input	Effect
5-minute cache write	1.25x	Pays off after one cache read
1-hour cache write	2x	Pays off after two cache reads
Cache read (hit)	0.1x	90% off repeated context
Batch API	0.5x in & out	50% off async (non-time-sensitive) jobs

Web search as a server tool is billed separately at $10 per 1,000 searches plus token costs. Caching and batching discounts stack with each other.

Worked example: cost of a typical Sonnet 4.6 request

A request that sends 20,000 input tokens and generates 2,000 output tokens on Sonnet 4.6:

Input: 20,000 × $3 / 1,000,000 = $0.060
Output: 2,000 × $15 / 1,000,000 = $0.030
Total: $0.090 per request

If 16,000 of the input tokens are served from a prompt cache (0.1x), the input drops to (4,000 × $3 + 16,000 × $0.30) / 1,000,000 = $0.0168, taking the request to about $0.047 — roughly half.

How Claude API pricing compares to OpenAI

At the flagship tier the two are close: Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI GPT-5.5 both charge $5 input, with Opus at $25 output vs GPT-5.5 at $30. OpenAI tends to win at the cheap and mid tiers — GPT-5.4-nano ($0.20 / $1.25) undercuts Haiku 4.5. For the full side-by-side, see ChatGPT vs Claude API cost and the OpenAI API pricing table.