why are the models the same price?

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing

``` Model Base Input Tokens 5m Cache Writes 1h Cache Writes Cache Hits & Refreshes Output Tokens

Claude Opus 4.8 $5 / MTok $6.25 / MTok $10 / MTok $0.50 / MTok $25 / MTok

Claude Opus 4.7 $5 / MTok $6.25 / MTok $10 / MTok $0.50 / MTok $25 / MTok

Claude Opus 4.6 $5 / MTok $6.25 / MTok $10 / MTok $0.50 / MTok $25 / MTok

Claude Opus 4.5 $5 / MTok $6.25 / MTok $10 / MTok $0.50 / MTok $25 / MTok

Claude Opus 4.1 $15 / MTok $18.75 / MTok $30 / MTok $1.50 / MTok $75 / MTok

Claude Opus 4 (deprecated) $15 / MTok $18.75 / MTok $30 / MTok $1.50 / MTok $75 / MTok

Claude Sonnet 4.6 $3 / MTok $3.75 / MTok $6 / MTok $0.30 / MTok $15 / MTok

Claude Sonnet 4.5 $3 / MTok $3.75 / MTok $6 / MTok $0.30 / MTok $15 / MTok

Claude Sonnet 4 (deprecated) $3 / MTok $3.75 / MTok $6 / MTok $0.30 / MTok $15 / MTok

Claude Haiku 4.5 $1 / MTok $1.25 / MTok $2 / MTok $0.10 / MTok $5 / MTok

Claude Haiku 3.5 (retired, except on Bedrock and Vertex AI) $0.80 / MTok $1 / MTok $1.60 / MTok $0.08 / MTok $4 / MTok ```

Why shouldn’t they be? They are probably the same size and cost the same to run. They are not doing full training runs (eg Mythos) so don’t need to recover insane training costs.

I'd be kind of shocked if a model that came out six months ago is the same size and cost to run as one that just came out today.

Same price on a token basis, but usually steadily decreasing on a task basis

Opus 4.7 and presumably 4.8 are more expensive due to a new tokenizer that translates data into more tokens per input.