Anthropic · AI model API pricing

How much does Claude Sonnet 5 cost?

Anthropic's speed/intelligence balance — near-Opus coding quality at Sonnet rates.

Rate card

What that means per month

Standard on-demand rates from Anthropic's official pricing docs, last checked 2026-07-27. These are the introductory rates Anthropic actually bills through Aug 31, 2026. Standard pricing of $3 in / $0.30 cached / $15 out takes effect Sept 1, 2026 — a 50% increase, so budget beyond August at the higher rate. Monthly figures exclude caching and batch discounts. Confirm live pricing before committing.

Where Claude Sonnet 5 sits on price

At the reference month of 10M input and 3M output tokens, Claude Sonnet 5 costs $50, which makes it the 23rd cheapest of the 30 models tracked here. That is 29× the price of Qwen-Flash, the cheapest model at this mix ($1.70). Among the 11 mid-tier models it ranks 10th, behind MiniMax M3 at $6.60.

Cache economics

Cached input on Claude Sonnet 5 bills at $0.20 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 $20 to $5.60, leaving output untouched at $30 — 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 Sonnet 5 ($50/mo):

• Gemini 3.5 Flash $42/mo
• Grok 4.5 $38/mo
• Grok 4.6 $38/mo

Claude Sonnet 5 head-to-head