Claude Sonnet 4.6 pricing
Claude Sonnet 4.6 API cost from Anthropic — $3.00 per 1M input tokens and $15.00 per 1M output tokens. Best speed/intelligence; caching cuts input ~90%. Estimate your real monthly bill below, then compare it against every other model.
Balanced 1M context · all prices USD per 1M tokens, list price last verified 2026-06-27.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 capabilities & limits
Representative specs for this tier — confirm exact limits in the Anthropic docs.
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Call Claude Sonnet 4.6 from your code
The exact model string and endpoint to use. Uses the Anthropic API format.
claude-sonnet-4-6https://api.anthropic.com/v1ANTHROPIC_API_KEYcurl https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages \
-H "x-api-key: $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" \
-H "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "claude-sonnet-4-6",
"max_tokens": 1024,
"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
}'Model strings follow each provider's naming convention; confirm the current id in the Anthropic docs before relying on it.
What a Claude Sonnet 4.6 API call actually costs
Blended input + output cost at Claude Sonnet 4.6's list rates — useful yardsticks before you commit to volume.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 cost calculator
Enter your monthly volume to estimate the Claude Sonnet 4.6 bill. Runs entirely in your browser.
Anthropic models — Claude Sonnet 4.6 in context
How Claude Sonnet 4.6 prices against its siblings. Cheapest reference cost first.
| Model | Input /1M | Output /1M | Cost / call* | Context | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 4.5 Fastest, near-frontier | $1.00 | $5.00 | $0.0060 | 200K | Fast / cheap |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 Best speed/intelligence; caching cuts input ~90% | $3.00 | $15.00 | $0.018 | 1M | Balanced |
| Claude Opus 4.8 Top Opus reasoning/agentic | $5.00 | $25.00 | $0.030 | 1M | Flagship |
| Claude Fable 5 Most capable widely released | $10.00 | $50.00 | $0.060 | 1M | Flagship |
*Reference cost of one call with 1,000 input + 1,000 output tokens — a neutral yardstick. Use the calculator for your real usage. Cheapest row highlighted.
How Claude Sonnet 4.6 pricing works
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is billed per token: a lower input price of $3.00 per million tokens for everything you send, and a higher output price of $15.00 per million for everything the model generates. To turn that into a real Claude Sonnet 4.6 bill, multiply by your monthly request volume and average prompt/response length — the calculator above does exactly that.
Prompt caching is the biggest lever on your Claude Sonnet 4.6 cost: cached input tokens bill at just $0.300 per million — about 90% cheaper. If you reuse a long system prompt or context across calls, caching can dramatically cut the input portion of your bill.
List prices move fast — always confirm the current numbers on the official Anthropic pricing page before relying on them for budgeting.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 pricing FAQ
How much does the Claude Sonnet 4.6 API cost?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3.00 per 1M input tokens and $15.00 per 1M output tokens, with cached input at $0.300 per 1M (about 90% off). A typical 3K-input / 500-output call works out to about $0.017.
What is Claude Sonnet 4.6's context window?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a 1M-token context window. Tokens you put in the prompt are billed at the $3.00 per 1M input rate.
Does Claude Sonnet 4.6 support prompt caching?
Yes. Claude Sonnet 4.6 bills cached input tokens at $0.300 per 1M instead of $3.00 — roughly 90% cheaper for the repeated part of your prompts.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Claude Sonnet 4.6?
In the same balanced tier, Command R (Cohere) is cheaper at $0.150 in / $0.600 out. The overall cheapest model on the market is Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B.