Claude Opus 4.7: $15.00/MTok input — Anthropic's most powerful model. When is it worth 5× Sonnet's price? Complete pricing breakdown, use cases, and cost reduction strategies.
Bottom line: For 90% of production use cases, Claude Sonnet 4.6 ($3.00/MTok) delivers near-Opus quality at 80% lower cost. Use Opus when you genuinely need maximum reasoning depth and errors are costly. If you're unsure, benchmark Sonnet first.
| Token Type | Price (per 1M tokens) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Input (standard) | $15.00 | 5× Claude Sonnet 4.6 input rate |
| Output | $75.00 | 5× Claude Sonnet 4.6 output rate |
| Cache write | $18.75 | 1.25× input price, one-time per TTL window |
| Cache read 90% off | $1.50 | 10% of standard input — best Opus cost reduction available |
| Model | Input | Output | Cache Read | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 4.5 Cheapest | $0.80 | $4.00 | $0.08 | High-volume, latency-sensitive |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 Best value | $3.00 | $15.00 | $0.30 | Most production workloads |
| Claude Opus 4.7 Most powerful | $15.00 | $75.00 | $1.50 | Maximum-stakes reasoning |
| Scenario | Use Opus? | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Customer support chatbot | No — use Haiku | Haiku handles conversational tasks at 19× lower cost |
| Code generation (routine) | No — use Sonnet | Sonnet matches Opus on most coding benchmarks at 80% lower cost |
| Legal contract analysis | Potentially yes | High-stakes — a missed clause costs more than the token difference |
| Advanced mathematics / proofs | Yes | Opus shows clear superiority on complex multi-step math |
| Research synthesis (long docs) | Yes + caching | Cache the corpus at $1.50/MTok read; Opus reasoning justifies cost |
| Content generation at scale | No — use Sonnet | Quality difference not worth 5× cost for most content workloads |
| Agent orchestration | No — use Sonnet | Sonnet's reliability is sufficient; use Opus for specific hard sub-tasks only |
Legal brief analysis, medical literature review, financial model validation — tasks where a single mistake has consequences exceeding the cost difference between Sonnet ($15/MTok output) and Opus ($75/MTok output). When accuracy isn't negotiable, Opus's reasoning depth earns its price.
Multi-step planning with tool use where Sonnet fails or gets stuck. Opus is better at recovering from dead ends, maintaining coherent long-term goals, and parsing ambiguous instructions. Use it as the orchestrator in a mixed-model setup where Haiku handles sub-tasks.
Designing system architecture, reviewing security-critical code, or debugging complex concurrency issues — tasks where Sonnet's code quality is insufficient. Opus consistently outperforms on HumanEval hard problems and architectural reasoning tasks.
Academic and enterprise research teams that repeatedly query the same large corpus (papers, reports, legal texts) can offset Opus's cost with 90% caching discount. $1.50/MTok cache read vs $15/MTok standard — with 100 queries per document, caching pays for itself immediately.
| Task | Input Tokens | Output Tokens | Cost/Call | Monthly (1,000 calls/day) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contract clause review | 5,000 | 500 | $0.1125 | $3,375 |
| Research synthesis | 20,000 | 2,000 | $0.45 | $13,500 |
| Research synthesis (cached) 90% off input | 20,000 cached | 2,000 | $0.18 | $5,400 |
| Advanced code review | 3,000 | 1,000 | $0.12 | $3,600 |
Paste your real prompt and see exact costs across Claude Opus, Sonnet, Haiku, GPT-4o, and Gemini — with cache savings and monthly volume projections.
Open the LLM Pricing Calculator →Claude Opus 4.7 costs $15.00 per million input tokens and $75.00 per million output tokens. That's $0.015 per 1,000 input tokens and $0.075 per 1,000 output tokens. With prompt caching, cache reads cost $1.50/MTok — a 90% discount on repeated context. Cache writes cost $18.75/MTok (one-time per TTL window).
On most everyday tasks, no — Claude Sonnet 4.6 performs at roughly 90–95% of Opus quality while costing 80% less. On complex reasoning tasks (advanced math, multi-step planning, nuanced analysis), Opus shows a clearer quality advantage. The 5× cost difference is only justified when the quality gap matters for your specific workload. Benchmark both on your actual task before committing to Opus pricing at scale.
Yes, Claude Opus 4.7 supports extended thinking mode — where the model produces a reasoning chain before the final answer. Extended thinking tokens are billed as output tokens ($75.00/MTok), which makes deliberate use important. For tasks where Opus's standard output isn't sufficient, extended thinking can push quality higher — but costs add up quickly. Budget 1,000–5,000 extra thinking tokens per complex call.
The current model ID is claude-opus-4-7. Use this in your API calls: model="claude-opus-4-7". Previous generation was claude-3-opus-20240229. If you're migrating, note that the 4.x series has improved reasoning, better tool use, and updated pricing — verify your billing expectations after migration.
Switch to Opus when: (1) you've benchmarked Sonnet on your specific task and it produces unacceptable errors, (2) the cost of a wrong answer exceeds the cost difference per call, or (3) you're doing research/analysis where maximum reasoning depth is the product. Never switch speculatively — always benchmark. Most teams find that Sonnet handles 95%+ of their workload and Opus is reserved for a small subset of high-stakes queries.
Also see: Claude Haiku Pricing · Claude Sonnet Pricing · GPT-4o vs Claude Cost · LLM Cost Comparison 2026 · Gemini API Pricing