Claude Sonnet 4 API Pricing
Anthropic · context window 200K · prices updated 2026-09-29
Where Claude Sonnet 4 sits on price
At $15.00 per million output tokens, Claude Sonnet 4 is a premium tier model — 6.8× the median output price of $2.20, which puts it cheaper than 13% and pricier than 87% of the models we track. It sits 17th cheapest of the 29 Anthropic models we track. Output costs 5.0× input, the usual spread — trim both, starting with the answer length.
Cached input is 90% cheaper. On an input-heavy workload you need roughly a 28% cache-hit rate to take 25% off the input line — reachable for chatbots and agents that resend the same system prompt and history.
What real workloads cost on Claude Sonnet 4
These three workloads are the ones teams actually run on a premium-priced model — a $15.00/1M model is not bought for the same job as one ten times the price.
| Workload | Per request | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot — 500 conversations/day (5K in / 1.4K out) Conversation history re-sent each turn — the classic prompt-caching win. | $0.036 | $540 |
| Coding agent — 300 sessions/day (60K in / 12K out) Multi-step loops re-read the same files; caching matters more than raw price. | $0.36 | $3240 |
| Small app — 1K requests/day (500 in / 150 out) The baseline most side projects actually run at. | $0.0037 | $113 |
Model your exact traffic in the API cost calculator — it preloads Claude Sonnet 4 with caching and batch options.
Claude Sonnet 4 price history
Claude Sonnet 4's price has not moved since we began tracking it on Aug 2, 2026 — 58 days of stability in a market where 88 of the 353 models we track have repriced over the same period. Anthropic's lineup has held steady across the board.
Change-points from our daily price snapshots (tracking since Aug 2, 2026; intraday moves between snapshots are not captured).
Claude Sonnet 4 vs Kimi K3
The closest-priced alternative from another vendor is Kimi K3 (Moonshot (Kimi)) — priced within a rounding error on output, with identical input pricing. When two models land this close on price, the decision is quality on your own workload, not the price sheet: run 50 real requests through both and compare.
See Kimi K3 pricing →Cheaper alternatives
More Anthropic models
Frequently asked questions
› How much does the Claude Sonnet 4 API cost?
Claude Sonnet 4 costs $3.00 per million input tokens and $15.00 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.3 per million (90% cheaper). That works out to roughly 66,667 output tokens per dollar.
› What does the support chatbot workload cost on Claude Sonnet 4?
Support chatbot — 500 conversations/day (5K in / 1.4K out) costs about $0.036 per request and $540 per month on Claude Sonnet 4. Conversation history re-sent each turn — the classic prompt-caching win.
› What does it cost to fill Claude Sonnet 4's 200K context window?
Sending 200K of input in a single request costs $0.6 at $3.00 per million tokens — before any output. With prompt caching that same fill drops to about $0.06 on repeat requests. This is why large context windows are cheap to advertise and expensive to actually use.
› Is Claude Sonnet 4 worth the price?
Claude Sonnet 4 sits in the middle of the market (17 of 29 by price within Anthropic). The honest test is a routing experiment: send the same 200 real requests to this model and to a tier below, and compare failure rate against the price gap — most teams find a majority of traffic never needed the pricier model.