Model board / Claude Sonnet 5

Verified 2026-09-03 against the pages listed below. Prices are USD per 1M tokens, list rate — no committed-use, enterprise or volume discount.

$2/$10 is now the standard rate. The rise to $3/$15 announced for 2026-09-01 will not occur — the pricing page withdrew it on 2026-08-27, and that date has now passed with the rate unmoved. 1h cache write $4.00

full 1M window at standard rates; 128K max output per request

read 0.1x input; 5m write 1.25x, 1h write 2x

Watch out

the 50% rise scheduled for 2026-09-01 was withdrawn, and 2026-09-01 has now come and gone at $2/$10 — a budget sized on $3/$15 is overstated

What we would use it for

Best capability-per-dollar on the board, and no longer on a clock

What this has cost, week by week

Output price at each refresh since 2026-07-30. A vendor change is the provider changing its price. Our correction means this board changed what it prints and the provider's charge did not move — the two are never merged, because publishing the second as the first would be a price rise that never happened.

Where these numbers came from

• https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing
• https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-caching

No number on this page was written that was not read from one of those pages on 2026-09-03. If one is wrong, send us the source URL and it is corrected in the next weekly refresh, with a changelog line saying what was wrong — contact@naderu.com.

Jobs this is one of our picks for

• Agentic coding — Long tool-use loops over whole repos (agentic-coding)
• Copy editing — Rewrite for grammar, tone and house style (copy-editing)

Discussed in Naderu Weekly

• The price has a clock on it — 2026-08-27
• The clock is now part of the bill — 2026-08-14
• The same weights, twice — 2026-08-06

The rest of the board

This row sits alongside 53 others on the model board, refreshed every week. The same data as JSON, and the terms for using it, are at /board-data.