# Anthropic

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/llm-apis/anthropic/

Hosted inference for the Claude model family, sold per million tokens with prompt caching and a batch tier.

## Who it suits

Teams that want the full 1M-token window at the standard per-token rate rather than a long-context surcharge, and that can use caching and batch to cut a frontier-model bill roughly in half.

Consider something else if Its cheapest model is $1 per million input tokens, several times what the budget tiers at Google, OpenAI and DeepSeek charge, so high-volume simple work is priced against you.

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Pricing model: Per million tokens, priced separately for input and output and per model, with multipliers stacked on top: prompt caching, a 50% batch discount, a 1.1x uplift for US-only inference on Claude 4.6 and later, and a fast-mode premium. ([source](https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/about-claude/pricing), read 2026-09-06)

### Inference

- Input price, top model: $10 per million input tokens for Claude Fable 5.1, the most capable model. Claude Opus 5 is $5 and Claude Sonnet 5 is $2. ([source](https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/about-claude/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- Output price, top model: $50 per million output tokens for Claude Fable 5.1. Claude Opus 5 is $25 and Claude Sonnet 5 is $10. ([source](https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/about-claude/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- Input price, cheapest model: $1 per million input tokens for Claude Haiku 4.5, the cheapest current model, with output at $5. ([source](https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/about-claude/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- Context window: 1M tokens on Claude Fable 5.1, Claude Opus 5 and Claude Sonnet 5; 200K on Claude Haiku 4.5. Anthropic states the full 1M window is billed at standard per-token rates. ([source](https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/about-claude/models/overview), read 2026-09-06)
- Max output tokens: 128K tokens on the top three models, 64K on Claude Haiku 4.5. The Batch API supports up to 300K output tokens on several models behind a beta header. ([source](https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/about-claude/models/overview), read 2026-09-06)
- Prompt caching: Supported ([source](https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/about-claude/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- Batch discount: 50% off both input and output tokens through the Batch API, for asynchronous processing. ([source](https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/about-claude/pricing), read 2026-09-06)

## Compared with

- [Anthropic vs OpenAI](https://inetgeek.com/compare/anthropic-vs-openai/)
- [Anthropic vs Google Gemini API](https://inetgeek.com/compare/anthropic-vs-google-gemini/)
- [Anthropic vs DeepSeek](https://inetgeek.com/compare/anthropic-vs-deepseek/)