Anthropic · AI model API pricing
How much does Claude Opus 4.8 cost?
The previous Opus generation — same $5/$25 rate as Opus 5, still available and widely deployed.
Rate card
| Input tokens | $5 / 1M |
| Cached input | $0.50 / 1M |
| Output tokens | $25 / 1M |
| Context window | 1M |
What that means per month
| Workload | Tokens / month | Cost / month |
|---|---|---|
| Prototype | 1M in · 0.3M out | $12.5/mo |
| Small app | 10M in · 3M out | $125/mo |
| Production app | 50M in · 15M out | $625/mo |
| High volume | 200M in · 60M out | $2,500/mo |
| Heavy platform | 1B in · 300M out | $12,500/mo |
Standard on-demand rates from Anthropic's official pricing docs, last checked 2026-07-16. Cached-input reads bill at ~10% of the input rate. Monthly figures exclude caching and batch discounts. Confirm live pricing before committing.
Where Claude Opus 4.8 sits on price
At the reference month of 10M input and 3M output tokens, Claude Opus 4.8 costs $125, which makes it the 28th cheapest of the 30 models tracked here. That is 74× the price of Qwen-Flash, the cheapest model at this mix ($1.70). Among the 10 frontier-class models it ranks 8th, behind GLM-5.2 at $27.2.
Cache economics
Cached input on Claude Opus 4.8 bills at $0.50 per 1M — 10% of its own input rate, against a 10% median across the models here that publish a cached-read price. 2 models discount cached reads more steeply than this. On the reference month, serving 80% of that input from cache takes the input side of the bill from $50 to $14, leaving output untouched at $75 — which is why a high reuse rate changes the ranking above rather than just shaving the total.
Cache reads only. Writes are billed separately by some providers and are excluded here — see the rate note above for Anthropic's terms. Try it at your own hit rate on the AI cost calculator.
Cheaper alternatives
At a reference workload of 10M input / 3M output tokens a month, these cost less than Claude Opus 4.8 ($125/mo):
- Claude Opus 5 $125/mo
-
Kimi K3 $75/mo -
Gemini 3.1 Pro $56/mo