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Opus 4(.1) is so expensive[1]. Even Sonnet[2] costs me $5 per hour (basically) using OpenRouter + Codename Goose[3]. The crazy thing is Sonnet 3.5 costs the sam

• Aeolun 1y ago
  In every price comparison I make. Claude (API) always comes out cheapest if you manage to keep most of your context cached. 90% price reduction for input is crazy.
  • cma 1y ago
    Cached prices: $.31 for Gemini Pro / Mtok, $1.50 for claude opus 4.1 / Mtok There's additional storage costs with google caching, around $3.75 for 5 minutes/Mtok, and Claude Opus is $3.75 for 5minute Cache Writes / Mtok. For cached reads Gemini Pro is 5X cheaper than Opus and like $0.01 more than Sonnet.
• generalizations 1y ago
  Get a subscription and use claude code - that's how you get actual reasonable economics out of it. I use claude code all day on the max subscription and maybe twice in the last two weeks have I actually hit usage limits.
  • tgtweak 1y ago
    Is it considerably more cost effective than cline+sonnet api calls with caching and diff edits? Same context length and throughput limits? Anecdotally I find gpt4.1 (and mini) were pretty good at those agentic programming tasks but the lack of token caching made the costs blow up with long context.
    • deleted 1y ago
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    • bavell 1y ago
      I'm on the basic $20/mo sub and only ran into token cap limitations in the first few days of using Claude Code (now 2-3 weeks in) before I started being more aggressive about clearing the context. Long contexts will eat up tokens caps quickly when you are having extended back-and-forth conversations with the model. Otherwise, it's been effectively "unlimited" for my own use.
      • bgirard 1y ago
        YMMV I'm using the $100/mo max subscription and I hit the limit during a focused coding session where I'm giving it prompts non-stop. Unfortunately there's no easy tool to inspect usage. I started a project to parse the Claude logs using Claude and generate a Chrome trace with it. It's promising but it was taking my tokens away from my core project.
        • bartman 1y ago
          Check out ccusage, it sounds like the tool you’re describing: https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage
          • bgirard 1y ago
            That's neat. According to the tool I'm consuming ~300m tokens per day coding with a (retail?) cost of ~125$/day. The output of the model is definitely worth $100/mo to me.
• kroaton 1y ago
  GLM 4.5 / Kimi K2 / Qwen Coder 3 / Gemini Pro 2.5
• energy123 1y ago
  Large models are for querying the model Small models are for querying the context Opus is cheap if you use it for its niche
  • thimabi 1y ago
    > Large models are for querying the model > Small models are for querying the context I respectfully disagree. My experience is that large models are capable of understanding large contexts much better. Of course they are more expensive and slower, too. But in terms of accuracy, large models are always better at querying the context.
• killerstorm 1y ago
  Well, it's expensive compared to other models. But it's often much cheaper than human labor. E.g. if need a self-contained script to do some data processing, for example, Opus can often do that in one shot. 500 line Python script would cost around $1, and as long as it's not tricky it just works - you don't need back-and-forth. I don't think it's possible to employ any human to make 500 line Python script for $1 (unless it's a free intern or a student), let alone do it in one minute. Of course, if you use LLM interactively, for many small tasks, Opus might be too expensive, and you probably want a faster model anyway. Really depends on how you use it. (You can do quite a lot in file-at-once mode. E.g. Gemini 2.5 Flash could write 35 KB of code of a full ML experiment in Python - self-contained with data loading, model setup training, evaluation, all in one file, pretty much on the first try.)