Quick answer
- Claude Opus 4.8 price
- $5 in / $25 out per MTok
- Claude Sonnet 5 price
- $3 in / $15 out per MTok (Intro pricing $2/$10 through Aug 31, 2026)
- Claude Haiku 4.5 price
- $1 in / $5 out per MTok
- Opus headline
- SWE-bench Verified 88.6% (swebench.com leaderboard)
The Three Tiers, Side by Side
The Claude lineup in July 2026 is a clean ladder: Claude Haiku 4.5 (October 2025) at the bottom, Claude Sonnet 5 (June 30, 2026) as the new mid-tier default, Claude Opus 4.8 (May 28, 2026) as the flagship, and Claude Fable 5 above all of them in the Mythos-class frontier tier. This page is about the three tiers you will actually route most work between:
| Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Claude Haiku 4.5 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price (per MTok) | $5 in / $25 out | $3 in / $15 out | $1 in / $5 out |
| Price note | Fast mode $10/$50 | Intro pricing $2/$10 through Aug 31, 2026 | — |
| Released | May 28, 2026 | June 30, 2026 | October 2025 |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 1M tokens (default) | 200k tokens |
| Tier | Flagship | Workhorse | Fast/cheap |
| SWE-bench Verified | 88.6% (swebench.com leaderboard) | Not in our verified set | Not in our verified set |
| SWE-bench Pro | 69.2% (Scale leaderboard) | Not in our verified set | Not in our verified set |
| Claude Code access | /model opus (recommended starting point for complex agentic coding) | /model sonnet | /model haiku |
What Each Tier Is Actually For
Claude Opus 4.8: the recommended starting point
The flagship workhorse for complex agentic coding, Anthropic's own recommended starting point. Anthropic's guidance is unusually direct here: Opus is the recommended starting point for complex agentic coding, and the 88.6% SWE-bench Verified / 69.2% SWE-bench Pro scores back it up. Full breakdown on the Opus 4.8 page.
Strengths
- Strongest price-to-capability ratio for hard coding tasks
- Effort defaults to high, thorough on multi-file changes
- Half Fable 5's price with most of the capability
Trade-offs
- Fable 5 measurably ahead on the hardest benchmarks
- Slower than Sonnet on quick iterations
Best for
- Day-to-day feature implementation on real codebases
- Complex agentic coding sessions
- Code review passes on big diffs
Claude Sonnet 5: routine work and volume
The new mid-tier default: 1M context standard, new tokenizer, replaces Sonnet 4.6. The intro pricing (Intro pricing $2/$10 through Aug 31, 2026) makes it the cheapest serious coding model right now, and the 1M-token default context removes the old mid-tier penalty of not fitting the repo. Full breakdown on the Sonnet 5 page.
Strengths
- 1M context at mid-tier pricing
- Fast enough for tight edit-test loops
- Intro pricing makes it the cheapest serious coding model right now
Trade-offs
- Noticeably behind Opus/Fable on hard multi-step reasoning
- New tokenizer changes token-count budgeting vs Sonnet 4.6
Best for
- Routine feature work, tests, and refactors
- High-volume parallel agent fleets where cost dominates
- Fast iteration loops with human review
Claude Haiku 4.5: subagents and mechanical work
The fast/cheap tier: sub-agents, classification, quick mechanical edits. It is the oldest model in the current lineup (October 2025) and the only one still on a 200k tokens window, but for fan-out work where you spawn ten cheap subagents, nothing else in the family comes close on cost. Full breakdown on the Haiku 4.5 page.
Strengths
- Cheapest Claude tier by far
- Low latency, good for sub-agent fan-outs
Trade-offs
- Oldest model in the current lineup (Oct 2025)
- 200k context, smallest window in the family
- Not built for complex autonomous coding
Best for
- Cheap sub-agents inside larger workflows
- Lint-fix style mechanical changes
- Summarization and triage
Ship your first agent today
Download AIDEN free and point it at your existing Claude Code or Codex setup. No credit card, running in minutes.
Download AIDEN freeFree to start · macOS 12+ · No credit card required
Cost per Story: The Actual Numbers
Per-MTok prices are abstract; stories are not. Take a realistic agentic story, 300k input tokens of repo context, spec, and tool results, 60k output tokens of code and reasoning, and the tier choice turns into dollars:
| 300k in / 60k out | Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Claude Haiku 4.5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input cost | $1.50 | $0.90 | $0.30 |
| Output cost | $1.50 | $0.90 | $0.30 |
| Story total | $3.00 | $1.80 | $0.60 |
So: $3.00, $1.80, $0.60 per story at standard pricing, and Sonnet is even cheaper than that until August 31 under its intro pricing (Intro pricing $2/$10 through Aug 31, 2026). For scale, the same story on Claude Fable 5 at $10/$50 per MTok runs about $6.00. The gaps look dramatic in percentage terms and small in absolute terms, which is exactly why the right question is not “which is cheapest” but “which tier fails least on this story”: one failed $1.80 Sonnet run plus a $3.00 Opus retry costs more than starting on Opus. The full ladder, including Fable 5, is mapped in the best Claude model for coding.
The Opusplan Pattern: Plan High, Implement Cheap
The pattern the community converged on is plan with Opus, implement with Sonnet, popularized by Claude Code's opusplan model setting, which uses Opus in plan mode and hands execution to Sonnet. The logic: architectural mistakes are the expensive kind, so spend the premium tokens where mistakes compound, then let the workhorse type out the plan.
The math holds up. On our 300k-in/60k-out story, suppose planning takes 50k input and 10k output tokens and implementation takes the remaining 250k/50k. All-Opus costs $3.00; Opus-plans-Sonnet-implements costs about $2.00, a third off, while keeping the flagship on the decisions that matter. On a hard story you flip it and stay on Opus throughout; on a routine one you skip Opus entirely and let Sonnet plan too.
Fleet Economics: Mixing Tiers Across Parallel Agents
The tier question changes shape once you run agents in parallel. A common setup is a Sonnet fleet with an Opus lead: the one genuinely hard story goes to Opus, the four routine ones run on Sonnet simultaneously. Five stories at our worked rates: $10.20 for the mixed fleet versus $15.00 for all-Opus, roughly a third cheaper for the same wall-clock time, because the stories that did not need the flagship did not pay for it.
The catch is that per-story routing is tedious to do by hand across terminal tabs. That is the part AIDEN automates: it runs your existing Claude Code CLI on a kanban board where each story is a card with its own git branch and its own model assignment, so Opus takes the migration story while Sonnet clears the backlog next to it. The full lineup, including the GPT-5.6 side, lives at AI models for coding.