Friday, 7 August 2026 | Updating Daily AI insight, written for builders

Claude Sonnet 4.6

Claude Sonnet 4.6 — Especificaciones

DesarrolladorAnthropic
TipoLLM
ModalidadTexto y visión → texto
ParámetrosNo revelado
Ventana de contexto1 millón
Salida máxima64 K
LicenciaPropietario
Pesos abiertosNo
Lanzado2025
Precio de entrada3,00 USD por cada millón
Precio de salida15,00 USD por cada millón
Proveedores de APIAnthropic, AWS, Vertex AI, Azure

Página oficial →

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

Entrada (por cada millón de tokens)$3.00
Salida (por cada millón de tokens)$15.00
Output/input ratio
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.

Carga de trabajoTokens/mesCost / month
Proyecto secundario1 millón de tokens de entrada / 0,25 millones de tokens de salida$6.75
Pequeño equipo20 millones de tokens de entrada / 5 millones de tokens de salida$135
Producción200 millones de tokens de entrada / 50 millones de tokens de salida$1,350

Run your own numbers in the Calculadora de costos de API de IA.

Cheaper alternatives to Claude Sonnet 4.6

ModelosDólares por millón combinadosYou save
GLM 5.2 abierta$2.0063% cheaper
Gemini 3.5 Flash$3.0044% cheaper
Gemini 3.1 Pro$4.0026% cheaper

Preguntas frecuentes

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 Base de datos de modelos de IA o el Clasificación de modelos de lenguaje grande (LLM).

Scroll to Top
Featured on There's An AI For That