Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs Opus: Vision Pricing Breakdown

Anthropic fundamentally disrupted the LLM pricing tier list with the release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet. It routinely outperforms the significantly more expensive Claude 3 Opus model, particularly in vision tasks.

Anthropic's Vision Token Math

Anthropic handles images differently than OpenAI. They dynamically resize images based on their aspect ratio, aiming for a maximum of 1.09 million pixels, which translates to roughly ~1,600 tokens per image.

• Claude 3 Opus: At $15.00 per 1M input tokens, a single image costs approximately $0.024.
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet: At $3.00 per 1M input tokens, the same image costs approximately $0.0048.

The Verdict

Because Sonnet is 5x cheaper than Opus and offers superior OCR and chart-reading capabilities, there is virtually no enterprise use-case where Opus should be used for high-volume image analysis.

Always benchmark your actual payloads. Drop your images into our secure Cost Calculator to see the exact token math before deploying to production.