How much do Claude tokens cost?
On Anthropic's published API pricing (August 2026): Claude Opus 5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens; Sonnet 5 costs $2 and $10; Haiku 4.5 costs $1 and $5. A million tokens is roughly 750,000 words, so casual use costs cents — sustained agent work is where bills grow.
What a token is.
Models read text in tokens — chunks of roughly four characters, or about three-quarters of an English word. "Landing page" is three tokens, not two. You pay separately for input (what you send, including context) and output (what the model writes), and output tokens cost about five times more on every Claude model.
Current Claude API prices per million tokens.
| Model | Input per 1M tokens | Output per 1M tokens | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5 | $5.00 | $25.00 | The hardest reasoning and long agent runs |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2.00 | $10.00 | Everyday building — the default for most projects |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 | $5.00 | High-volume simple tasks where speed and price rule |
Prices change — check Anthropic's pricing page before budgeting a real product.
A worked example.
Say a coding session sends 100,000 input tokens and gets back 20,000 output tokens on Sonnet 5. Input: 0.1 × $2 = $0.20. Output: 0.02 × $10 = $0.20. Total: $0.40 for the session. The same session on Opus 5 costs $1.00; on Haiku 4.5, $0.20.
API or subscription?
The API bills per token and fits products that call Claude programmatically. For a person building things, a subscription is simpler and capped: Claude Pro is $17 a month billed annually ($20 monthly) and includes Claude Code, the agent used to build every tool on this site — see the tiny-web-tool guide. This Claude referral link starts a plan.
Estimate your own prompt.
The free AI Token Cost Calculator counts tokens in any pasted prompt and compares estimated cost across Claude, GPT, Gemini, and more — in the browser, nothing uploaded. For general LLM budgeting, see the free LLM cost estimator page.