Claude Sonnet 4.6 — Specifications
| Developer | Anthropic |
|---|---|
| Type | LLM |
| Modality | Text, Vision → Text |
| Parameters | Undisclosed |
| Context window | 1M |
| Max output | 64K |
| License | Proprietary |
| Open weights | No |
| Released | 2025 |
| Input price | $3.00 /1M |
| Output price | $15.00 /1M |
| API providers | Anthropic, AWS, Vertex AI, Azure |
What is Claude Sonnet 4.6?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic’s balance point between speed and intelligence: adaptive
thinking, a 1M-token context window, 64K maximum output, and pricing of $3 in / $15 out per
million tokens. It is the default workhorse for most production workloads, and the tier most
teams land on after discovering that Opus is overkill for the majority of their traffic and
Haiku is underpowered for the rest.
What makes Sonnet the pragmatic pick is that it gives up very little at the top of the
range while costing 40% less than Opus 4.8 on both input and output. The 1M context is
identical, adaptive thinking is identical, and the gap only becomes visible on genuinely
hard multi-step reasoning. For retrieval-augmented generation, code review, structured
extraction over long documents and customer-facing assistants, that gap rarely shows up in
output quality but always shows up on the invoice. Note that Claude Sonnet 5 now sits below
it on price — $2 / $10 during its introductory period — so a new project should compare the
two directly before committing to 4.6.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 pricing: API cost per 1M tokens
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $3.00 |
|---|---|
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $15.00 |
| Output/input ratio | 5× |
| Blended (4:1 in:out) | $5.40 per 1M tokens |
What Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs per month
Real monthly spend at a 4:1 input-to-output mix — the ratio a typical chat or RAG workload actually produces.
| Workload | Tokens / month | Cost / month |
|---|---|---|
| Side project | 1M in / 0.25M out | $6.75 |
| Small team | 20M in / 5M out | $135 |
| Production | 200M in / 50M out | $1,350 |
Run your own numbers in the AI API cost calculator.
Cheaper alternatives to Claude Sonnet 4.6
| Model | Blended $/1M | You save |
|---|---|---|
| GLM 5.2 open | $2.00 | 63% cheaper |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | $3.00 | 44% cheaper |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | $4.00 | 26% cheaper |
Frequently asked questions
How much does Claude Sonnet 4.6 cost per 1M tokens?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3.00 per 1M input tokens and $15.00 per 1M output tokens. At a typical 4:1 input-to-output mix that blends to about $5.40 per 1M tokens.
How much does Claude Sonnet 4.6 cost per month?
A small-team workload of 20M input and 5M output tokens a month costs about $135 on Claude Sonnet 4.6. A side project (1M in / 0.25M out) costs roughly $6.75.
What is a cheaper alternative to Claude Sonnet 4.6?
GLM 5.2 is the strongest cheaper option in our database at $2.00 per 1M blended — about 63% less than Claude Sonnet 4.6. It is also open-weight, so self-hosting is an option.
Can I run Claude Sonnet 4.6 locally?
No. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is a closed, API-only model — the weights are not released, so it cannot be self-hosted.
Why does Claude Sonnet 4.6 charge more for output than input?
Output tokens are generated one at a time and cannot be batched the way a prompt can, so they cost the provider more to serve. Claude Sonnet 4.6 charges 5× more for output, which is why prompt-heavy workloads are far cheaper to run than generation-heavy ones.
See every Claude model priced side by side: Claude API pricing.
Prices are the published list rates for the model's primary API and are reviewed as providers change them. Volume, batch and cached-input discounts are not included. Compare every model side by side in the AI models database or the LLM leaderboard.
