pricing-guidance

Claude API pricing is per-token: Opus costs more per token for complex tasks, Sonnet balances performance and cost, and Haiku is lowest-cost for simple queries. Multiply your input and output tokens by the model's respective per-token rate to get total cost.

Choose based on task complexity: Haiku for high-volume simple tasks, Sonnet for balanced workloads, Opus for complex reasoning. Matching task requirements to model tier prevents overpaying for unnecessary capability.

Context Editing can reduce token costs by up to 66% on multi-turn conversations by reusing cached context instead of reprocessing. For a 30-turn conversation, calculate baseline tokens without caching, then apply 66% savings to see ROI.

Compare token costs across models for your typical workload, then calculate monthly savings. ROI depends on request volume and task complexity—lower-tier models save money but may increase latency or reduce output quality for complex tasks.

Yes, pricing guidance applies to multi-turn conversations and accounts for context accumulation. Token-cost optimization formulas help you calculate per-turn costs and evaluate whether Context Editing or model downgrading improves efficiency.

You track tokens manually using provided formulas and pricing breakdowns, or use API response metadata that reports input and output tokens consumed. This data feeds into ROI calculations and tier recommendations.