Claude Opus 4.8 Input Price Rises to $5.00/MTok

What changed

On May 28, 2026, Anthropic increased Claude Opus 4.8 input pricing from $4.50 to $5.00 per million tokens. That is an 11% increase. Output pricing stays at $25.00/MTok.

This is the only price increase across all three providers in 2026 so far.

The cost impact

For a team making 10,000 Opus calls per day at 2,000 input tokens each:

• -Before: 10,000 x 2,000 / 1,000,000 x $4.50 = $90/day
• -After: 10,000 x 2,000 / 1,000,000 x $5.00 = $100/day
• -Monthly increase: ~$300

The increase is modest per call, but it compounds fast at high volumes.

Why it matters

Opus 4-8 now matches GPT 5.5 at $5.00/MTok input after OpenAI's May 15 cut. The flagship tier has converged on a $5.00 input price point across providers.

Here is how flagships compare today:

• -Claude Opus 4.8: $5.00 input, $25.00 output
• -GPT 5.5: $5.00 input, $30.00 output
• -GPT 5.6 Sol: $5.00 input, $30.00 output
• -Claude Fable 5: $10.00 input, $50.00 output

Opus offers the cheapest flagship output pricing at $25.00/MTok. For output-heavy workloads, Opus remains the best value in the flagship tier.

What to do

Review whether your Opus workloads require flagship-tier confidence scores. Claude Sonnet 4.6 at $3.00/MTok handles code review at 95/100 confidence. That is higher than Opus at 94/100 for the same task.

Check your cost breakdown at /teardown or track live spend with a free dashboard.