Opus has new rates. The task still determines the bill
If you give Claude something bigger than a paragraph to tidy up, you probably care about the bill too. Opus 5.5, released on September 22, 2026, has standard API rates of $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. Tokens are the units into which a model divides the text it reads and writes. Anthropic positions this version for code, documents and agents that work through successive steps of a task.
The company offers another figure: according to its measurements, a typical task should cost around 40 percent less than with Opus 5. Notice the word “task.” We can look up a token’s price, but the final cost also depends on how much text the model reads and generates along the way.
Longer jobs call for looking at the whole session
For a small text correction, the difference might barely register. It matters more when Claude opens more files, returns to the code and revises the result several times. That is the workflow we would be most interested in: what does it cost to finish the job?
Let’s include our own time too. A report with clear sources or a code change explaining its decisions is easier to review. Coming back after a break, we want to know what the model checked and where information is still missing. That part of the result can matter more than the length of the answer.
Your archive may already contain the best comparison
Take a closed bug report or a completed report. You know the outcome and remember the difficult parts. Give both model versions the same materials, then compare the result, cost and time needed to check it.
For code, look at how the feature behaves and at edge cases: situations at the limits of its assumptions. For a report, revisit the numbers, sources and conclusions. If this work takes up a large part of your week, even a small improvement will be noticeable. This is a suggested comparison for your own task; Anthropic’s figures remain the manufacturer’s results.
Sources and further reading
The sources behind this article. Instructions and example scenarios are suggestions from our editorial team.