Claude API vs OpenAI API 2026: Token Prices Compared

Short answer: at list price, neither API is cheaper on short prompts. Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol both cost $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, and Haiku 5.5 matches GPT-6 Luna rate for rate at the budget end. The gap opens on long prompts: past 272,000 input tokens OpenAI doubles the input rate, while Claude's mid and top models keep one rate up to 1M tokens. Prices read October 21, 2026.

Our take: pick the vendor on prompt length and model quality, not on the rate card. The two companies have priced their main tiers into a near tie, so the line items that differ (cache lifetime, the long-context threshold, Haiku's 100,000-token step) decide which invoice is smaller for your workload.

Toolradar data: among the 483 API tools tracked by Toolradar, the software directory we run, the OpenAI API is listed as an alternative to 80 tools, joint #2 in the category, and the Anthropic API to 23 tools, joint #16, as of October 2026. Buyers also open OpenAI's comparison pages more often: 124 visits in the last 30 days against 45 for Anthropic's.

Which API is cheaper, tier by tier?

Each vendor sells a cheap model, a mid model and a top model, and the list prices pair up almost exactly. The table uses each vendor's standard rates for short prompts, per million tokens, from Anthropic's API pricing documentation and OpenAI's API pricing page.

Tier	Claude model	Claude input / output	OpenAI model	OpenAI input / output	Cheaper
Budget	Haiku 5.5	$0.10 / $0.50	GPT-6 Luna	$0.10 / $0.50	Tie on prompts up to 100K tokens
Mid	Sonnet 5.5	$2 / $10	GPT-6.1 Sol	$2 / $10	Tie on prompts up to 272K tokens
Upper mid	Opus 5.5	$4 / $20	No current flagship at this price	n/a	Claude has the only option
Top	Fable 5.1	$10 / $50	GPT-6 Astra	$10 / $50	Tie on list rates; Claude on caching and long prompts

Opus 5.5 is the one model without a twin. OpenAI's flagship table jumps from Sol to Astra, five times the price. The nearest OpenAI rate is gpt-5.6-sol, an earlier model at the same $4 and $20, which OpenAI says keeps its promotional pricing at least through November 21, 2026. A team that finds Sol too weak for a task has a cheaper step up on Claude than on OpenAI.

Same price per token is not the same bill per task. Anthropic says the tokenizer on Claude 4.7 and later models produces about 30% more tokens for the same text than its earlier models did. Neither vendor publishes how its token counts compare with the other's, so run a sample of your real prompts through each token counter before you call the two mid tiers equal.

Where does the long-prompt surcharge hit?

Long context is the biggest price difference between the two APIs. Both mid and top models accept roughly a million tokens of context: OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol model page lists a 1,050,000-token window, and Anthropic's Sonnet 5.5 overview lists 1M. They charge for that window differently.

Model	Rate on a long prompt, input / output	Where the step starts
Sonnet 5.5	Unchanged	No step
GPT-6.1 Sol	$4 / $15	Over 272K input tokens
Fable 5.1	Unchanged	No step
GPT-6 Astra	$20 / $75	Over 272K input tokens
Haiku 5.5	$0.50 / $2.50	Over 100K input tokens
GPT-6 Luna	$0.20 / $0.75	Over 272K input tokens

OpenAI's long rate applies to the full request, not only the tokens past the line. Anthropic says the 1M window on Claude 4.6 and later models costs the same per token as a short prompt, with Haiku 5.5 as the exception. Haiku's step comes early: a 150,000-token prompt pays five times Luna's input rate, because Luna has not reached its own line yet. That makes the cheap tier the one place where prompt length can flip the winner toward OpenAI.

The practical split: for repository-wide code review, long contracts or chat histories that grow past OpenAI's line, Claude's mid and top tiers cost less. For cheap bulk work on prompts between 100,000 and 272,000 tokens, Luna costs less.

Prompt caching: same price, different clock

Both vendors now bill cache writes, and at the default lifetime they charge the same 1.25x the input rate. The difference is how long that write lasts: 5 minutes on Claude, 30 minutes on OpenAI. OpenAI's prompt caching guide sets the 30-minute default and a 12-hour option, and Anthropic offers a 1-hour option.

Cache item	Claude	OpenAI
Default write lifetime and price	5 minutes, 1.25x input	30 minutes, 1.25x input
Longer write option	1 hour, 2x input	12 hours, 2.5x input
Read on the mid model	Sonnet 5.5: $0.10	GPT-6.1 Sol: the same rate
Read on the top model	Fable 5.1: $0.25	GPT-6 Astra: $1.00
Read on the budget model	Haiku 5.5: $0.01	GPT-6 Luna: $0.01
Read on Opus 5.5	$0.20	No equivalent
Smallest cacheable prompt	512 tokens on Sonnet 5.5	1,024 tokens on GPT-5.6 and later

The lifetime matters for chat products. A user who replies eight minutes later has lost a default Claude cache but not an OpenAI one, so the Claude app either pays the 2x one-hour write or writes the prefix again. A batch job or an agent loop that fires every few seconds never sees that gap.

At the top tier the read price favors Claude. Fable 5.1 bills a cache hit at 2.5% of its input rate, while Astra bills 10%, so a long system prompt reused all day costs a quarter as much to read on Fable.

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What three real workloads cost on each API

Rates on the page are only useful once they meet a workload. These three are our arithmetic on the list prices above, standard tier, with no discount, Batch or credit applied.

Workload 1, a support bot with no caching: 50 million input tokens and 5 million output tokens a month, with every prompt short enough to stay on standard rates.

Tier	Claude	OpenAI
Budget (Haiku 5.5 / Luna)	$7.50	$7.50
Mid (Sonnet 5.5 / Sol)	$150	$150
Upper mid (Opus 5.5)	$300	n/a
Top (Fable 5.1 / Astra)	$750	$750

Workload 2, the same bot with caching: of the 50 million input tokens, 40 million are cache reads, 2 million are cache writes at the default lifetime and 8 million are plain input. Output stays at 5 million.

Tier	Claude	OpenAI
Budget	$3.95	$3.95
Mid	$75	$75
Upper mid (Opus 5.5)	$150	n/a
Top	$365	$395

Caching halves the mid-tier bill on both sides, and output becomes two thirds of what remains, so trimming response length is the next saving. The top-tier gap is the cache-read price alone: the same 40 million reads cost $40 on Astra and a quarter of that on Fable. The table assumes the same number of writes on both, which flatters Claude for chat products: with its 5-minute default, slow users would trigger more writes than this.

Workload 3, a code-review agent with long prompts: 200 requests a month, each sending 300,000 input tokens and returning 2,000 output tokens, which totals 60 million input and 400,000 output tokens.

Tier	Claude	OpenAI
Budget (Haiku 5.5 / Luna)	$31	$12.30
Mid (Sonnet 5.5 / Sol)	$124	$246
Upper mid (Opus 5.5)	$248	n/a
Top (Fable 5.1 / Astra)	$620	$1,230

Every request crosses OpenAI's long-prompt line, so Sol bills its long rate on all 60 million input tokens and lands at about double Sonnet 5.5. Haiku 5.5 is past its own, lower step as well, which is why Luna wins the budget row. Opus 5.5 costs about the same as Sol here, so a team with long prompts can move up a tier on Claude for roughly the money it would spend on OpenAI's mid model.

Batch, Fast mode and data residency

The discounts and premiums outside the base rate also line up closely.

• Batch: half price on both. Anthropic's Batch API takes 50% off input and output, and OpenAI prices Batch and Flex at 50% below Standard. Sonnet 5.5 and Sol both drop to $1 and $5.
• Fast output: among current Claude models, fast mode covers only Opus 5.5, at $8 and $40, double its standard rate. OpenAI charges 2x for Fast mode on Luna, Sol and Astra, and 6x for Ultrafast on Sol and Astra.
• Keeping data in the US: Anthropic adds a 1.1x multiplier for US-only inference on Claude 4.6 and later, and OpenAI adds a 10% uplift on regional processing for models released on or after March 5, 2026. The premium is the same.
• Web search: both charge the same fee per 1,000 searches, plus the tokens the results add to the prompt.

One tool differs. Claude's code execution includes 1,550 free hours per organization each month, then bills $0.05 per container hour, and it is free when the request also uses web search or web fetch. OpenAI bills hosted containers per 20-minute session, from $0.03 for 1 GB.

Free credits and spend caps

Neither API has a free plan in the subscription sense. Anthropic says new users get a small amount of free credit to test the API. OpenAI's rate limits guide lists a Free tier, but that is a $100 monthly usage limit for eligible countries, not a grant of free tokens. Our free LLM APIs guide covers the providers that do give tokens away.

The spend caps matter more for a team planning a launch. On Claude, the Start tier caps spend at $500 a month, Build at $1,000 and Scale at $200,000, and Anthropic's rate limits page says organizations move up automatically based on usage history and account standing. When the cap is hit, the API returns HTTP 429 until the first of the next month unless you request a higher limit. OpenAI publishes the thresholds instead: $5 of credit purchases unlocks a $500 monthly limit, $100 unlocks $5,000, and $500 unlocks $200,000.

For a startup expecting a spike, that difference is concrete. On OpenAI you can buy your way to the $5,000 tier with $100 of credit on day one. On Claude, the jump from $1,000 to $200,000 depends on usage history, so request the increase before launch day, not during it.

Which API should you pick?

Pick the Claude API if your prompts run past OpenAI's long-prompt line, if you want a model between the mid and top price points (Opus 5.5), or if you reuse a long prompt on the top model all day. Our Claude Code pricing explainer covers the subscription route if you mainly want Claude for coding.

Pick the OpenAI API if your app has slow, human-paced conversations that benefit from a 30-minute cache, if you run cheap bulk jobs on mid-length prompts that sit between Haiku's step and OpenAI's, or if you need predictable spend tiers on launch day.

On short prompts at the mid tier, the rate cards will not decide it. Model quality on your own tasks will, and our ChatGPT vs Claude for coding comparison covers that side for programming work. If you would rather not commit, a router lets you call both through one key: our OpenRouter alternatives list covers the options, and our best LLM APIs ranking adds Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral, Together AI and xAI.

Teams wiring either model into a coding agent can compare the two vendors' own agents in our Codex vs Claude Code page, the Claude Code review and the OpenAI Codex review. Our AI coding assistant pricing roundup prices the seat-based tools, and if the agents need outside data, our MCP servers for developers list covers the connectors.

How we compared the prices

Every rate comes from the two vendors' own documentation, read on October 21, 2026: Anthropic's API pricing, Sonnet 5.5 overview and rate limits pages, and OpenAI's API pricing, GPT-6.1 Sol model, prompt caching and rate limits pages. The comparison uses the standard tier and the global (non-residency) rate unless a row says otherwise. Workload costs are our arithmetic on those list prices, with assumed token volumes stated in each workload; they do not include tokenizer differences, discounts or negotiated rates. The Toolradar figures come from the Anthropic API and OpenAI API profiles on Toolradar, October 2026. We did not benchmark output quality.

Cite this: Devshot, "Claude API vs OpenAI API 2026: Token Prices Compared", October 2026. Prices verified on vendor pages, October 21, 2026.

FAQ

Is the Claude API cheaper than the OpenAI API in 2026?

On short prompts the main tiers cost the same: Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol share one list rate per million tokens, and so do Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6 Luna. Claude is cheaper on prompts over 272,000 tokens, where OpenAI doubles the input rate, and OpenAI's Luna is cheaper than Haiku 5.5 on mid-length prompts, from 100,000 tokens up to OpenAI's line.

What is the cheapest model on each API?

Haiku 5.5 on Claude and GPT-6 Luna on OpenAI, which share the lowest list rate of either API: $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens on short prompts. Haiku's rates rise fivefold once a prompt passes 100,000 tokens, while Luna keeps its rate up to 272,000.

Does OpenAI or Anthropic charge for prompt cache writes?

Both do. The default write costs 1.25x the input rate on both APIs, but it lasts 5 minutes on Claude and 30 minutes on OpenAI. Cache reads on the mid models, Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol, cost the same, at 5% of the input rate.

Is GPT-6 Astra or Claude Fable 5.1 cheaper?

Their standard list rates are identical. Fable 5.1 costs less on cache reads ($0.25 against $1.00 per million) and on prompts past OpenAI's long-prompt line, where Astra moves to its higher long-context rate. In our cached workload of 50 million input tokens, Fable came to $365 a month against $395 on Astra.

Do the Claude and OpenAI APIs have a free tier?

Not as free tokens. Anthropic gives new users a small amount of free credit to test the API. OpenAI's Free tier is a $100 monthly usage limit for eligible countries, and paid tiers start once you buy $5 of credit.

Does Batch processing cost the same on both?

Yes. Both take 50% off input and output for Batch requests, so Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol each fall to $1 and $5 per million tokens. OpenAI also prices its Flex tier at the same 50% discount.

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