Anthropic · Claude Opus · Frontier
Claude Opus 4.5 pricing and limits
Anthropic's most capable model at a much lower rate than earlier Opus versions. Strong for long-horizon agents and coding, with prompt caching that rewards stable prefixes and penalizes churn.
| Line | Tokens | Rate / 1M | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input, uncached | 4,000 | $5.00 | $0.0200 |
| Input, cache read | 26,000 | $0.50 | $0.0130 |
| Output | 2,500 | $25.00 | $0.0625 |
- Input / 1M
- $5.00
- Output / 1M
- $25.00
- Cached / 1M
- $0.50
- Cache write / 1M
- $6.25
- Blended 3:1
- $10.00
- Context
- 200K
What drives Claude Opus 4.5 cost
Anthropic caching is explicit: you mark cache breakpoints, the first request writes the prefix at a premium over the input rate, and later reads cost a tenth of input. A five-minute cache write costs 1.25x input and a one-hour write costs 2x. If your prefix changes every request, you pay the write premium every time and never collect the read discount.
Extended thinking tokens are billed as output tokens, and output is the most expensive line on Opus. Agents that think at length on every tool step accumulate output cost quickly; the effort setting and a thinking budget keep that predictable.
Cost of a typical call
Take a agent step with 30,000 input tokens, 26,000 of them served from cache, and 2,500 output tokens. At Claude Opus 4.5 list prices ($5.00 input, $0.50 cached input, $25.00 output per 1M) one call costs $0.0955, against $0.2125 with no cache hits. At 60,000 calls a month that is $5,730, or $12,750 uncached.
Blended at a 3:1 input to output ratio, Claude Opus 4.5 costs $10.00 per 1M tokens. Routing the same call to the fallback in the policy below, Claude Sonnet 4.5, costs $0.0573, which is what a tenant pays you in COGS once they cross the hard cap and PALM SOUQ downgrades instead of blocking.
Cost comparison
Claude Opus 4.5 against three alternatives
The same agent step priced on Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro. Move the sliders to match your traffic; models without a cache-read rate bill every input token in full.
Benchmark quality per task before switching. A cheaper model that needs more steps or longer outputs can cost more per finished task than its rate suggests, which is why PALM SOUQ reports cost per feature, not only per token.
Claude Opus 4.5 this guide
$0.0950 per call
$4,753 / mo
baseline
Claude Sonnet 4.5
$0.0570 per call
$2,852 / mo
-40% vs Claude Opus 4.5
GPT-5
$0.0331 per call
$1,657 / mo
-65% vs Claude Opus 4.5
Gemini 2.5 Pro
$0.0380 per call
$1,898 / mo
-60% vs Claude Opus 4.5
List prices from the PALM SOUQ LLM Price Index, computed per call as uncached input + cache reads + output. Reasoning tokens count as output on reasoning models.
Rate limits by usage tier
Anthropic applies requests per minute, input tokens per minute and output tokens per minute per model, raised as your organization moves up usage tiers by cumulative credit purchases. Cached input reads do not count toward input token limits for most current models, so good caching also raises effective throughput.
Exact limits vary by account tier and change over time, so we do not reprint them here. Check the limits page for your own account in the Anthropic documentation at docs.anthropic.com. PALM SOUQ enforces your own per-tenant limits in front of the provider's, so a single customer cannot consume the shared allowance that every other tenant depends on.
Circuit-breaker best practices
Track cache writes and cache reads as separate line items per tenant. A sudden drop in read share after a deploy usually means a dynamic value moved into the cached prefix, and PALM SOUQ can alert on that ratio before the month closes.
For long-running Opus agents, use a max step cap plus a per-session dollar ceiling. Opus sessions can legitimately run many steps, so a cost ceiling per session is a better guard than a low step count alone.
When a breaker trips, the gateway answers in under 50 ms with HTTP 429 and X-PalmSouq-Reason: circuit_breaker_triggered, before the request reaches Anthropic. Your agent framework sees a normal rate-limit response and stops, and the audit log records which heuristic fired and for which tenant.
# palmsouq.policy.yaml
policy: claude-opus-4-5-enterprise
match:
model: claude-opus-4.5
tier: enterprise # from X-PalmSouq-Tier
budgets:
monthly_usd: 900 # per tenant
soft_cap_pct: 80 # webhook to your app
on_hard_cap: fallback # or: block (HTTP 429)
fallback:
- claude-sonnet-4.5
breakers:
tool_thrashing: { identical_calls: 3, window_steps: 8 }
token_velocity: { max_tokens_per_s: 50000, window_s: 10 }
semantic_echo: { repeats: 3 }
max_steps: 40
cache:
meter_reads: true
meter_writes: true
alert_read_share_below: 0.6- budgetsPer-tenant monthly dollar cap with an 80% soft-cap webhook, keyed by X-PalmSouq-Tenant.
- fallbackAt the hard cap, requests reroute to Claude Sonnet 4.5 ($6.00 blended per 1M) instead of failing.
- breakersAll four loop heuristics on, evaluated in the request path with under 5 ms added latency.
Where it fits
Long-horizon coding agents, complex research and tasks where a stronger model saves more steps than it costs. Fall back to Sonnet when a tenant nears its budget instead of locking them out.
Provider documentation: docs.anthropic.com
Claude Opus 4.5 pricing questions
How much does Claude Opus 4.5 cost per million tokens?
At list price Claude Opus 4.5 costs $5.00 per 1M input tokens and $25.00 per 1M output tokens, with cached input at $0.50 per 1M and five-minute cache writes at $6.25 per 1M. Prices were last reviewed in the PALM SOUQ LLM Price Index and are for the standard tier and shortest context band.
Does Claude Opus 4.5 support prompt caching?
Yes. Cache reads cost $0.50 per 1M tokens and cache writes cost $6.25 per 1M for the five-minute TTL. Caching saves money only when a prefix is read more often than it is rewritten, which is why PALM SOUQ meters reads and writes separately per tenant.
What are the Claude Opus 4.5 rate limits?
Anthropic applies requests per minute, input tokens per minute and output tokens per minute per model, raised as your organization moves up usage tiers by cumulative credit purchases. Cached input reads do not count toward input token limits for most current models, so good caching also raises effective throughput. For your account's exact numbers, see the Anthropic documentation at docs.anthropic.com.
How do I stop runaway Claude Opus 4.5 agent loops?
Track cache writes and cache reads as separate line items per tenant. A sudden drop in read share after a deploy usually means a dynamic value moved into the cached prefix, and PALM SOUQ can alert on that ratio before the month closes. The sample policy on this page enables all four PALM SOUQ heuristics with a max step cap of 40 and falls back to Claude Sonnet 4.5 at the hard cap.
Is there a batch discount for Claude Opus 4.5?
50% off input and output through the Message Batches API. Batch traffic suits evaluations, backfills and nightly enrichment jobs that do not need a real-time answer.
Govern Claude Opus 4.5 spend per customer.
Point your Anthropic client at gateway.palmsouqltd.com, pass X-PalmSouq-Tenant, and every Claude Opus 4.5 token is attributed, capped and protected by circuit breakers.
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