Question 1

How much does the Claude Batch API cost?

Accepted Answer

The Claude Batch API provides a 50% discount on standard pricing. Claude Haiku 4.5 batch: $0.125/MTok input (vs $0.25 standard), $0.625/MTok output. Claude Sonnet 4.6 batch: $1.50/MTok input (vs $3.00 standard), $7.50/MTok output. Claude Opus 4.7 batch: $7.50/MTok input (vs $15.00 standard), $37.50/MTok output. These are some of the largest discounts available from any major LLM provider.

Question 2

What is the Claude Batch API?

Accepted Answer

The Claude Message Batches API lets you submit up to 100,000 requests in a single batch job. Instead of real-time responses, Anthropic processes your requests asynchronously and returns results within 24 hours (typically much sooner). In exchange for not requiring real-time SLAs, you get a 50% price reduction. Batch jobs are ideal for: data labeling, document classification, offline analysis, bulk summarization, content generation pipelines, and evaluation runs.

Question 3

When should I use the Batch API vs standard API?

Accepted Answer

Use Batch API when: your task is not user-facing (no one waiting for a real-time response), you can tolerate up to 24-hour completion time, you're processing a large dataset (hundreds to hundreds of thousands of documents), or you're running evaluations, fine-tuning data gen, or CI pipelines. Use standard API when: a human is waiting for the response, you need streaming output, your latency requirement is under ~30 seconds, or you're building a chatbot or real-time assistant.

Question 4

How much money can I save with Batch API?

Accepted Answer

Batch API saves exactly 50% on all Claude model pricing. On 1 billion tokens per month with Claude Sonnet: standard API costs $3,000 input + $15,000 output = $18,000/month. Batch API costs $1,500 + $7,500 = $9,000/month — a saving of $9,000/month or $108,000/year. For a data pipeline processing 10M documents at 1,000 tokens each (10B tokens): standard would cost $30,000 input; batch costs $15,000. The bigger your async workload, the larger the absolute savings.

Question 5

What is the maximum batch size for the Claude Batch API?

Accepted Answer

Each batch can contain up to 100,000 individual requests. Each request can use the full model context window (up to 200K tokens for Claude models). There is no documented limit on total token volume per batch, but very large batches (>10M tokens) may take longer to process. You can poll the batch status endpoint to check progress; Anthropic also supports webhook callbacks when the batch completes.

Model	Standard Input	Batch Input	Standard Output	Batch Output	Savings
Claude Haiku 4.5	$0.25/MTok	$0.125/MTok	$1.25/MTok	$0.625/MTok	50% off
Claude Sonnet 4.6	$3.00/MTok	$1.50/MTok	$15.00/MTok	$7.50/MTok	50% off
Claude Opus 4.7	$15.00/MTok	$7.50/MTok	$75.00/MTok	$37.50/MTok	50% off

Use Case	Volume/Month	Standard Cost	Batch Cost	Monthly Saving
Document classification (Haiku)	100M tokens	$25	$12.50	$12.50
Data labeling pipeline (Sonnet)	1B tokens	$18,000	$9,000	$9,000
Eval suite runs (Sonnet)	500M tokens	$9,000	$4,500	$4,500
Research analysis (Opus)	100M tokens	$9,000	$4,500	$4,500

Optimization	Discount	Best For	Latency Impact
Prompt caching	90% on cache reads	Repeated system prompts / context	None (real-time)
Batch API	50% on everything	Any async/offline workload	Up to 24 hours
Both combined	Up to 95% on cached input	Large-batch pipelines with shared context	Up to 24 hours

Claude Batch API Pricing 2026

Batch API Pricing vs Standard API

When to Use Batch API vs Standard API

✅ Use Batch API When...

→ Use Standard API When...

Monthly Savings Calculator: Real Examples

How to Use the Batch API (Python)

Batch API vs Prompt Caching — Which Saves More?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the maximum batch size?

Is Batch API available in all regions?

Can I cancel a batch job?