LLM Costs

How Much Does the Claude API Cost? Sonnet & Haiku Analysis

Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet is highly favored by software developers for its reasoning capabilities. However, its pricing is slightly premium compared to OpenAI. This guide details Claude API token pricing, caching mechanics, and budget estimations.

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1. Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Haiku Token Pricing

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is priced at $3.00 per million input tokens and $15.00 per million output tokens. The faster Claude 3.5 Haiku costs $0.80 per million input tokens and $4.00 per million output tokens. While Haiku is cheaper, Sonnet is often chosen due to its vastly superior code generation.

2. The Power of Claude's 90% Prompt Caching Discount

Anthropic provides highly advanced prompt caching. Writing a prompt to the cache costs a 25% premium (e.g. $3.75/MTok for Sonnet), but subsequent reads cost only $0.30 per million tokens—a 90% discount. For agents that carry long conversation histories or document context, this makes Claude extremely cost-competitive.

3. Estimating Monthly Operational Expenses

Without caching, 5,000 queries per day on Claude 3.5 Sonnet (assuming 3,000 input and 600 output tokens per query) costs approximately $2,700/month. By structuring system prompts to leverage caching, you can reduce this bill to under $600/month.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Claude offer a free developer API?

Anthropic does not offer a free production API. However, developers receive a small amount of free credits ($5) upon signing up to test integration.

How long does a Claude prompt cache last?

Claude's prompt cache has a time-to-live (TTL) of 5 minutes. If no requests hit the cache within 5 minutes, it expires and must be re-written.