Opus 5.5 cuts compute and price 20%, but Sonnet 5.5 keeps its price for margin
eliebakouch · x · 2026-11-02
Elie Bakouch notes that Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 show nearly identical gains over their predecessors in reasoning efficiency, speed, and cache consumption — the real difference is cost structure.
- Opus 5.5: 40% cheaper than Opus 5 on typical workloads at default settings; $4/$20 per million input/output tokens (20% cheaper); cache reads at $0.20/M (60% cheaper); 30%+ faster output. Anthropic explicitly says it requires less compute to serve and passes savings to price.
- Sonnet 5.5: priced the same as Sonnet 5 ($2/$10 per million tokens), cache reads halved to $0.10/M, up to 30% cheaper per task in testing, 30%+ faster.
The author's inference: Sonnet 5.5's serving cost likely dropped too, but its price didn't — suggesting Anthropic keeps a larger margin on the Sonnet line.
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