Claude Opus 4.1 token cost & pricing
Claude Opus 4.1 is Anthropic's most capable model, aimed at the hardest reasoning, research and software engineering tasks. It is priced as a premium product: $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens.
Claude Opus 4.1 specifications
| Vendor | Anthropic |
|---|---|
| Input price | $15 / 1M tokens |
| Output price | $75 / 1M tokens |
| Cached input price | $1.5 / 1M tokens (90% cheaper) |
| Context window | 200,000 tokens |
| Max output | 32,000 tokens |
| Open weights | No |
| Price rank | 17 of 17 (cheapest first) |
| Best for | premium, reasoning |
What Claude Opus 4.1 costs in practice
Four common workloads, priced at list rates. Monthly figures assume 30 days.
| Workload | Per request | Requests/day | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chatbot · 1K in / 500 out | $0.05 | 10,000 | $15,750 |
| RAG Q&A · 8K in / 400 out | $0.15 | 5,000 | $22,500 |
| Doc summary · 30K in / 1K out | $0.52 | 1,000 | $15,750 |
| Code agent · 60K in / 3K out | $1.13 | 500 | $16,875 |
How many requests does $100 buy?
Assuming a 1,000-token prompt and a 500-token response per request.
How Claude Opus 4.1 pricing actually works
Output at $75 per million is 5x Sonnet's, so a single long generation can cost more than a hundred Sonnet requests. Cached input at $1.50 per million (90% off) softens the blow for repeated-context workloads but does not fix the output price.
When to use Claude Opus 4.1
Justified only when Sonnet measurably fails: deeply nested refactors, subtle multi-constraint reasoning, high-stakes analysis where a wrong answer costs more than the tokens. Never use it as a default model or for anything user-facing at volume.
How to cut your Claude Opus 4.1 bill
Treat Opus as an escalation tier. Run the task on Sonnet, detect failure or low confidence, then retry on Opus. In practice this keeps most traffic on the cheaper model while preserving quality where it counts — often a 5-10x cost reduction versus Opus-only.
Other Anthropic models
Cheaper alternatives to Claude Opus 4.1
- Claude Sonnet 4.5Anthropic80% cheaper
- Grok 4xAI80% cheaper
- GPT-4oOpenAI86% cheaper
- GPT-5OpenAI88% cheaper
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