Claude Sonnet 4.6: what it costs to run
The price Anthropic lists for Claude Sonnet 4.6, what a support reply, a document summary and an agent task cost at it, and where that puts it among 37 models.
US dollars per million tokens, standard rate, shortest context band.
- 1,000 support replies
- $15.00
- Cached input
- $0.30
- Context window
- 1,000,000 tokens
- Released
- 17 Feb 2026
- Weights
- Closed
From Anthropic’s own pages, 22 September 2026.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens on Anthropic’s own API, and $0.30 for cached input. At those prices 1,000 support replies cost $15.00, the 7th most expensive of 33 priced models on our list.
What a job costs
Three jobs, 1,000 runs of each, at the list price above, and where each puts Claude Sonnet 4.6 among the 33 models with a list price.
| Job | 1,000 runs | Among 33 |
|---|---|---|
| Support reply3,000 in, 400 out. | $15.00 | 7th most expensive |
| Document summary25,000 in, 1,000 out. | $90.00 | 7th most expensive |
| Agent task80,000 in (70,000 cached), 3,000 out. | $96.00 | 9th most expensive |
The token counts are ours, chosen to look like real work; the prices are Anthropic’s. All three jobs stay under 200,000 tokens a request, below every long-context surcharge on the list.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 on real small-business tasks
What the AIGROW benchmark measured when Claude Sonnet 4.6 was given 20 office tasks, each marked pass or fail by fixed checks.
- Success rate
- 75% of 20 runs passed (95% interval 53 to 89%), 23rd of 36 models.
- Cost per 1,000 passes
- $11.24, failed runs included, worked from list price.
- Answer time
- 28 s median, 54 s at the 90th percentile.
- Strongest and weakest
- Appointment scheduling (100% passed) and review replies (0%).
The small print
What the base rate above leaves out, copied from the maker’s pages: surcharges, discounts, promotions and cache pricing.
Legacy model, still available. Cache write $3.75 (5 min) or $6 (1 h). Batch API 50% off. US-only inference (inference_geo) bills 1.1x. Full context window billed at standard rates.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 against the models it is weighed with
Each comparison puts both list prices side by side and costs the same three jobs on each.
- vs Claude Sonnet 5
- An upgrade decision where the newer model is also the cheaper one.
Other Anthropic models
| Model | Input | Output | Context | 1,000 replies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 4.5Anthropic | $1.00 | $5.00 | 200K | $5.00 |
| Claude Sonnet 5Anthropic | $2.00 | $10.00 | 1M | $10.00 |
| Claude Opus 5Anthropic | $5.00 | $25.00 | 1M | $25.00 |
| Claude Fable 5.1Anthropic | $10.00 | $50.00 | 1M | $50.00 |
Where the price comes from
Read on 22 September 2026. Each price is the standard rate for the shortest context band, with no batch or priority discount; long-context surcharges, batch rates and promotions are in each model’s small print. No price was taken from a reseller.
Pay a quarter of list price
AIGROW API credit is metered at the makers’ list prices, and $25 buys $100 of usage. The credit page lists the models it covers; ask about any other before buying.
Prices checked 22 September 2026