Claude Opus 4.8
FrontierThe current flagship Opus tier. Adaptive thinking, 1M context at standard pricing (no long-context premium).
- Input / 1M
- $5.00
- Output / 1M
- $25.00
- Context
- 1M tokens
- Provider
- Anthropic
Pricing verified June 4, 2026. Prices change frequently. Always confirm against the provider’s official pricing page before relying on these figures for budgeting. Official pricing →
What Claude Opus 4.8 is best for
Highly autonomous agentic coding, knowledge work, and long-horizon execution at a lower price than Fable 5.
Use it for the hardest reasoning, long-horizon agentic work, and routes where output quality is load-bearing. Avoid it for high-volume, low-stakes calls like classification or extraction — those belong on a cheaper tier.
Claude Opus 4.8 cost by volume
Estimated monthly cost at three realistic volumes, at $5.00 input / $25.00 output per million tokens.
| Scenario | Input / mo | Output / mo | Est. cost / mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prototype | 2M | 0.5M | $23 |
| Growing product | 50M | 10M | $500 |
| At scale | 500M | 100M | $5,000 |
Plug in your own numbers with the cost calculator.
How to cut your Claude Opus 4.8 bill
The headline price isn’t the lever — your usage pattern is. The biggest reductions come from how you route and structure requests, not from switching models alone:
- Route low-stakes calls to a cheaper tier and keep Claude Opus 4.8 on the routes where its strengths matter.
- Cache large stable prompt prefixes so repeated context bills at a fraction of the price.
- Batch non-urgent work, and trim oversized context by retrieving instead of stuffing.
- Add fallback chains so a timeout doesn’t trigger an expensive retry.
Do it behind evals so quality holds — that combination is how teams cut 30–60% without regressions.
Context window: 1M tokens
Claude Opus 4.8’s context window bounds how much it can consider at once — system prompt, history, retrieved docs, and the response all draw from those 1M tokens, with up to 128K reserved for output. A larger window enables whole-codebase reasoning and long documents, but using more of it costs more per request — so retrieval and caching still matter even when the window is large.
Cheaper alternatives to Claude Opus 4.8
By blended cost (3:1 input:output). The right swap depends on whether quality holds on your routes — always validate with evals.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Claude Opus 4.8 cost?
Claude Opus 4.8 costs $5.00 per million input tokens and $25.00 per million output tokens. A workload of 50M input and 10M output tokens per month would cost about $500.
What is Claude Opus 4.8's context window?
Claude Opus 4.8 has a 1M-token context window, with up to 128K output tokens. The current flagship Opus tier. Adaptive thinking, 1M context at standard pricing (no long-context premium).
Is Claude Opus 4.8 the right model for my workload?
Highly autonomous agentic coding, knowledge work, and long-horizon execution at a lower price than Fable 5. The cheapest correct model is workload-specific — route low-stakes calls to a cheaper tier and reserve Claude Opus 4.8 for work where its strengths matter, validated by evals.