Claude API Pricing Explained (What It Actually...

Claude Opus 4 costs 15 USD/1M input tokens and 75 USD/1M output tokens; Sonnet 4 costs 3 USD and 15 USD; Haiku costs 0.80 USD and 4 USD. One token equals roughly 4 characters or 0.75 words; a 1,000-word blog post costs ~0.006 USD to process with Sonnet. Output tokens cost 5x more than input tokens, so response length dramatically affects total bill more than context size. Sonnet 4 offers best cost-to-quality ratio for production workloads; Opus for complex reasoning; Haiku for simple, cheap task