alt Hacker NewsFinally that price drop
Prices per 1M tokens Claude Opus 5.5 Claude Opus 5
Cache reads $0.20 $0.50
Input tokens $4 $5
Output tokens $20 $25
Cache writes $5 $6.25
If you are forced to reduce price despite raising capabilities, that certainly tells something about the market, and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too, since this model is their biggest topline contributor
Replies
Claude adapts to OpenAI’s surprising move to simply deliver better performance than Fable 5.1, better tools as well as featuring very low pricing.
Fable 5.1 literally was a money grabber. While I liked the results, tokens were burned so hard it was embarrassing, while Astra seemed to not care.
Also Claude makes it very hard to pay for additional token budgets, allowing only credit cards. I don’t use mine anymore since I don’t need it in everyday life I was dumbfounded.
So Anthropic is just copying OpenAI so to say, matching them and essentially with Opus 5.5 being Fable 5.1 in disguise, all they do is reduce costs.
Competition works.
People are paying for Opus 5? Not just burning down tokens left after they enjoyed Fable on the sub? Amazing.
We haven’t been able to use opus as much as we’d want because it’s been too expensive for general use, price drop is good so I can stop juggling different models and just use this daily unless it has some weird new issues
>and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too
have they ever shared anything about their revenue mix between consumer plans vs per-token billing? this is a revenue cut on their API billing, but they're not saying anything about increased limits on the plans. so all the plan revenue just got more profitable.
Footnote on their pricing page says:
> Cache hits and refreshes on Claude Opus 5.5 are priced at 0.05x the base input price.
If they do the same for Haiku and Sonnet 5.5 then we should also see 5c/mtok and 10c/mtok cache read for those models, respectively. Still too high for Haiku IMO, Luna is 2c/mtok.
This is good. Probably to match GPT pricing, though frontier Claude models are still not as token efficient.
All the anti-AI people constantly say that any moment now the prices will skyrocket and in the end human work will be cheaper compared to using AI.
It doesn't look like that's happening, on the contrary the prices are falling especially when taking into account capabilities.
60% cache read is cool, but subscription only get 25% more according to Cat. I'm confused
"Opus 5.5 requires less compute to serve than Opus 5, and its pricing reflects that."
It is only a price drop if price * tokens used is less