Claude Sonnet 4.6 Cost Calculator
Estimate API costs for Claude Sonnet 4.6 — Anthropic's balanced cost-quality tier. $3 input / $15 output per million tokens, 200K context. The default pick for most production workloads.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 pricing
Source: Anthropic pricing page (2026). 5× cheaper than Opus, 3× more expensive than Haiku.
| Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 Anthropic | $3.00 | $15.00 | 200K |
What you'll use this for
LLM costs scale fast. A quick estimate before you ship saves real money in production.
Budget planning
Project monthly and annual API spend before you ship. Catch surprises before billing does.
Comparing models
Pick the right model for your use case. Cheapest that passes your evals usually wins.
Cost optimization
Estimate caching impact, identify the cheapest viable model, find the breakeven for a smaller tier.
Pricing transparency
Show stakeholders concrete numbers for "what does AI cost us?" — no vendor pitch deck required.
How to estimate LLM cost
Paste a representative prompt
Use something real from your app, not a toy example. Token count scales with input length.
Set expected output tokens
How long is the model's reply? 500 tokens is a typical chat response; classification might be 5; agents can run thousands.
Set calls per day
Conservative is fine. Multiply by users × actions/user/day. The yearly figure is usually the eye-opener.
Read totals
Per call, per day, per month, per year. Toggle caching to see the discount impact.
Frequently asked questions
This calculator uses a rough heuristic of ~4 characters per token. Real tokenizers vary: code is denser, languages other than English are sparser, and each provider has its own tokenizer. Expect ±20% accuracy. For exact counts use the model-specific token counters.
From each provider's public pricing page as of 2026. Rates are subject to change; always verify on the provider site before relying on these numbers for procurement decisions.
Yes. No signup, no limits, no ads, no data leaves your browser.
Toggle "Input is cached" for an approximate 90% input-side discount. The exact discount varies by provider (Anthropic: 90%; OpenAI/Google: 50-75%). This calculator uses the Anthropic figure as a useful upper bound.
A few reasons. (1) Token counts on the provider may differ slightly from our ~4-char estimate. (2) System prompts, tool definitions, and retrieved context all count toward input. (3) Provider rates may have changed since this tool was last updated. (4) Some providers add surcharges for premium tiers, regional endpoints, or long-context overflow. Use this for ballpark estimates, not for final accounting.
About Claude Sonnet 4.6
Sonnet 4.6 is the model most teams settle on. At $3 / $15 per 1M it's one-fifth the price of Opus while delivering the bulk of its capability for code, chat, RAG, and agentic workflows. Anthropic positions it as the default tier and most of the ecosystem treats it that way.
Where Sonnet shines
Customer-facing chat agents, coding assistants, RAG over docs, structured extraction, most tool-use workflows. The 200K context comfortably handles long conversations and substantial retrieved context.
When to step up to Opus
If Sonnet repeatedly fails the same hard prompt — multi-step reasoning, subtle code refactors, nuanced instruction following — Opus is the next stop. Cheaper to pay 5× per call than to ship a wrong answer.
When to step down to Haiku
High-volume classifications, routing decisions, simple summarization, anything where latency and unit economics matter more than ceiling capability.