Claude Sonnet 4.6 API Pricing & Cost Calculator
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the gold standard for software development. Prompt caching makes multi-turn chat loops extremely affordable despite the flagship reasoning tier.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the industry workhorse for software engineering and multi-file codebase tasks.
By TechCompare · Updated
Calculator
Cost Comparison
Based on 100,000 input tokens (50% cached), 5,000 output tokens, and 100 requests.Prices are fetched live from OpenRouter and may include temporary promotional discounts not accounted for in our article and comparison figures.
How this is calculated
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is priced at $3.00 per million input tokens and $15.00 per million output tokens, supporting a 90% caching discount ($0.30 per million) and a 50% batch discount ($1.50 per million inputs, $7.50 per million outputs).
Verdict
Sonnet 4.6 lands at $3/M input and $15/M output, with cached input at $0.30/M and batch at $1.50/$7.50. The economics favor agentic coding workflows specifically: every call that reuses a stable system prompt plus tool definitions (typical for code agents) cuts roughly 90% off the input cost, which against a multi-turn chat loop compounds quickly. Output pricing matches GPT-5.4's $15/M, so tool-call-heavy loops cost about the same on both, and Anthropic's mature tool-use ergonomics are the deciding factor.
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Frequently asked questions
Does Claude Sonnet 4.6 support prompt caching?
How much does Claude Sonnet 4.6 cost per million output tokens?
Why is Sonnet 4.6 considered the best coding model?
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