Claude Opus 5.5 Pricing: Full Cost Breakdown (2026)

Claude opus 5.5 pricing lands at 4 dollars per million input tokens and 20 dollars per million output tokens — 20 per cent below Claude Opus 5's 5 and 25 dollars — with cache reads at 0.20 dollars per million, and Anthropic says the model works out about 40 per cent cheaper to run than Opus 5 on typical workloads, per the official announcement published on 22 September 2026.

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Every number in this breakdown comes from that announcement and from Anthropic's own model documentation, so you can plan budgets against it rather than guessing from screenshots. The short version for anyone running AI automations for profit: the strongest widely available Claude model just got cheaper on every line of the rate card, and the cache line got dramatically cheaper. Here is the full picture, what it means in pounds and pence for real workloads, and how it stacks up against the rival price cut OpenAI shipped the same week.

Claude Opus 5.5 Pricing: The Full Rate Card

Anthropic published the complete schedule alongside the release. The model ID is claude-opus-5-5, and these are the standard API rates, per million tokens, in US dollars.

The headline input and output cuts are both a straight 20 per cent. The cache read cut is the outlier: 0.20 against 0.50 is a 60 per cent reduction, and as you will see below, that single line changes the economics of agent workloads more than the headline rates do.

How the New Rates Compare With Claude Opus 5

Claude Opus 5 shipped on 24 July 2026, so its flagship run lasted barely two months before Anthropic moved it to the legacy list with an explicit recommendation to migrate. The full generational comparison — knowledge cutoffs, defaults and all — is covered in the Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Opus 5 breakdown, but on cost alone the migration case is simple: you pay less on every metered line for a model Anthropic says performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most work. There is no pricing scenario where staying on Opus 5 saves you money.

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Cache Pricing Is the Line That Changes Your Margins

For a single chat completion, claude opus 5.5 pricing differences of a dollar per million input tokens barely register. For agents, they compound. An agent re-reads its system prompt, its tool definitions and its working context on every step, and prompt caching is what stops that repetition being billed at full rate. At 0.20 dollars per million tokens, a cached read now costs one twentieth of a fresh input read. That is why Anthropic's 40 per cent typical-workload figure is bigger than the 20 per cent headline cut: long agent sessions leaning on cached context see the 60 per cent cache saving on the bulk of their token volume. If you run overnight automations through a Hermes agent OS setup, the cache line is the one to model first, because a standing agent loop is mostly cached reads punctuated by short bursts of fresh output.

Fast Mode Pricing: Double the Rate for Quicker Output

The announcement also lists a fast mode at 8 dollars input and 40 dollars output per million tokens — exactly double the standard rates. Anthropic already claims Opus 5.5 generates output more than 30 per cent faster than Opus 5 at standard pricing, so fast mode is for the narrower case where latency directly costs you money: client-facing tools, live workflows, anything where a human is waiting on the answer. For batch SEO generation, research runs and scheduled automations, standard mode is the obvious default; paying double to make an unattended job finish sooner rarely pays for itself.

What Claude Opus 5.5 Costs in Real Workloads

Put the pieces together and a realistic monthly picture emerges. Say your automation stack pushes 50 million input tokens, 10 million output tokens and 200 million cached reads a month — a plausible shape for a small agency running content, research and reporting agents. On Opus 5 rates that is 250 dollars of input, 250 of output and 100 of cache: roughly 600 dollars. On Claude Opus 5.5 the same volume is 200 plus 200 plus 40: 440 dollars, about 27 per cent off without touching your prompts. Skew the mix further towards cached agent loops and you approach Anthropic's 40 per cent figure. The point of arithmetic like this is that model price cuts are margin you keep — the deliverables you sell do not get cheaper because your token bill did. The guide to making money with Hermes agents covers the revenue side of that equation.

Claude Opus 5.5 Pricing vs GPT-6 Sol

The same week Opus 5.5 arrived, OpenAI cut GPT-6 Sol to 2 dollars input and 10 dollars output per million tokens, per its official API pricing documentation. On raw rates, Sol is half the price of Opus 5.5. On cache, they meet: both bill cached reads at 0.20 dollars per million. So the honest framing is that Anthropic is not competing on being cheapest — it is pricing Opus 5.5 as the premium option while cutting just enough that the gap stops being a blocker. Which model earns that premium for your workload is a benchmark question, not a pricing one, and the Goldie Bench write-up is the funnel's standing resource on how these frontier brains compare on real agent tasks. For choosing a day-to-day agent brain across price tiers, the best Hermes agent LLM guide walks the whole menu.

The Performance You Get for the Money

Price only means something against capability, so here are the benchmark figures Anthropic published with the release: 66.4 per cent on Terminal-Bench 4.0 for agentic coding, an 1846 Elo on the GDPval-AA v2.1 knowledge-work evaluation, 81.8 per cent partial completion on OSWorld 2.0 for computer use, and 67.7 per cent with tools on multidisciplinary reasoning. Anthropic's summary claim is that Opus 5.5 performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 — its own top-tier model — on most work, while sitting on an Opus-tier rate card. Treat vendor benchmarks as the vendor's best foot forward, as ever; the practical takeaway is that Anthropic is positioning near-flagship capability at 20 to 60 per cent lower rates than the model it replaces.

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Where You Can Run Claude Opus 5.5

The announcement lists availability on all major platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, alongside Anthropic's own API under the claude-opus-5-5 model ID. It also became the default Opus model in Claude Code from version 2.1.280, whose changelog notes 1M context and the same 4 and 20 dollar rates with 0.20 cache reads. If you already pay for a Claude subscription, there is a route that sidesteps per-token billing entirely: running the model through your existing plan inside a Hermes agent, covered step by step in the Hermes agent with Claude Code subscription guide and the Hermes Claude Opus 5.5 page. For heavier API use, the best Hermes agent models comparison helps you decide when Opus-tier is worth it over cheaper brains.

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Is Claude Opus 5.5 Worth the Price for AI SEO?

For content and SEO automation specifically, the calculus is favourable. SEO workloads are cache-heavy — the same site context, style guides and instructions re-read across hundreds of generations — which is exactly the traffic shape the 0.20 dollar cache line rewards. Earlier Opus generations already carried these workflows profitably, as the Claude Opus 4.7 AI SEO case study documents from the funnel's own archives, and this release delivers a stronger model at lower rates into the same pipelines. The Agent OS resource shows how those pipelines are structured if you want the full operating-system view of running content agents day to day.

The bottom line on claude opus 5.5 pricing: 4 dollars in, 20 dollars out, 0.20 dollars cached, roughly 40 per cent cheaper in practice than the model it replaces, and premium-tier but no longer painfully so against OpenAI's cut-price GPT-6 Sol. If your stack is already on Claude, migrating is free money; if it is not, the cache economics are the reason to run the comparison properly.

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