In my tests, it averages to much cheaper than Opus 4.8 on real tasks on account of being smarter and more token efficient.

I have a benchmark to build a game engine from a set of written instructions. It's a little tricky. Opus 4.8 did it in 470k tokens at a cost of $1.29 vs Opus 5 in 179k tokens for $0.33. (Fable 5 did it in 245k for $0.95)

Though if you really want to cut costs, Tencent's Hy3 model also got it right and did it in 283k tokens for $0.03