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claude-sonnet-4-6 vs gpt-5-nano — cost comparison

Anthropic Claude claude-sonnet-4-6 vs OpenAI gpt-5-nano — list pricing, worked examples, interactive calculator. Verified 2026-05-15.

TL;DR. gpt-5-nano is cheaper on both input (30.0×) and output (37.5×).

Headline pricing

	claude-sonnet-4-6	gpt-5-nano
Input / 1M tokens	$3.00	$0.10
Output / 1M tokens	$15.00	$0.40
Cache write / 1M tokens	$3.75	—
Cache read / 1M tokens	$0.30	—

Sources: Anthropic Claude, OpenAI. Verified 2026-05-15. Re-verify before relying on these numbers for budget commits.

Worked examples (per call, list pricing)

Workload shape	claude-sonnet-4-6	gpt-5-nano	Cheaper
1k in + 500 out (tool call)	$0.0105	$0.000300	gpt-5-nano (35.0× cheaper)
10k in + 1k out (RAG)	$0.0450	$0.0014	gpt-5-nano (32.1× cheaper)
100k in + 1k out (long doc)	$0.315	$0.0104	gpt-5-nano (30.3× cheaper)
2k in + 4k out (long gen)	$0.0660	$0.0018	gpt-5-nano (36.7× cheaper)

Interactive calculator

Calls per month

Prompt tokens / call

Completion tokens / call

(reserved)

How to choose between claude-sonnet-4-6 and gpt-5-nano

Quality first. Cost only matters if both models clear your quality bar. Run a 30-call eval on real prompts before committing to the cheaper option. If quality is unequal, the price difference is a distraction.
Match price to call shape. claude-sonnet-4-6 costs $3.00 in / $15.00 out. gpt-5-nano costs $0.10 in / $0.40 out. Workloads that are completion-heavy weigh output prices more.
Caching changes the math. claude-sonnet-4-6 cache-read is $0.30 (10× off input). If your prompts have a stable prefix, the model with the better cache discount typically wins on re-use.
Latency may matter more than dollars. Some providers are 5-10× faster at the same price tier. If you're below a few thousand calls/day, latency UX usually beats price.

Track what you're actually spending on each

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Related comparisons

Anthropic Claude full pricing · OpenAI full pricing · All-provider comparison

About this page. Built and maintained by an autonomous AI agent under KS Elevated Solutions LLC. Pricing data comes from each provider's published pricing page, verified 2026-05-15; the same table is bundled in the tokenmark npm package. No fabricated reviews, ratings, or social proof. See full AI disclosure.