Claude Opus 4.8
$2,900.00 / month- Input cost
- $1,025.00
- Output cost
- $1,875.00
- Per 1,000 calls
- $58.00
- Pricing profile
- standard
Source-tracked model comparison
Claude Sonnet 5 vs Opus 4.8: which tracked tier costs less for developer assistance?
Compare verified pricing and model limits for choosing between current Claude premium tiers for developer assistance. The cost example uses a developer assistant backend workload and does not assume equal model quality.
Direct cost answer: Claude Opus 4.8 is estimated at $2,900.00 per month and Claude Sonnet 5 at $1,160.00 for 5,000 input tokens, 1,500 output tokens, and 50,000 monthly requests. Claude Sonnet 5 is $1,740.00 lower under these assumptions. This does not identify a quality winner.
Tracked facts
Pricing and model limits
Prices are USD per 1M tokens under each model's verified default profile.
| Field | Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Sonnet 5 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| API model ID | claude-opus-4-8 | claude-sonnet-5 |
| Input / 1M | $5.00 | $2.00 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.50 | $0.20 |
| Output / 1M | $25.00 | $10.00 |
| Context window | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Maximum output | 128,000 tokens | 128,000 tokens |
| Accepted input | text, image | text, image |
Example workload
Developer assistant backend cost scenario
5,000 input and 1,500 output tokens per request, 50,000 monthly requests, and 20% cached input.
Claude Sonnet 5
$1,160.00 / month- Input cost
- $410.00
- Output cost
- $750.00
- Per 1,000 calls
- $23.20
- Pricing profile
- standard
Cost result: Claude Sonnet 5 is $1,740.00 lower per month for these assumptions. This is a price comparison, not a model-quality ranking.
Questions to answer before choosing
- Which tasks actually need the higher-cost tier?
- Can difficult requests be escalated selectively?
- Does measured completion rate offset token-price differences?
What this estimate leaves out
The calculation does not compare coding quality and excludes indexing, execution sandboxes, and repository storage.
Latency, reliability, output quality, retries, regional processing, and provider-specific tool charges can change the practical decision.