Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Opus 4.8
Claude Opus 5.5 costs less on output ($6.00 against $7.50 per million tokens); Claude Opus 4.8 costs less on input ($1.50 against $2.10). Both on one key at UplinkSwitch, each next to its developer's list price.
Prices · per million tokens, USD
| Tokens | Claude Opus 5.5claude-opus-5-5 | Claude Opus 4.8claude-opus-4-8 |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $2.10Anthropic lists $4.00 · 47% under | $1.50Anthropic lists $5.00 · 70% under |
| Cached input | $0.12Anthropic lists $0.20 · 40% under | $0.15Anthropic lists $0.50 · 70% under |
| Output | $6.00Anthropic lists $20.00 · 70% under | $7.50Anthropic lists $25.00 · 70% under |
| Context window | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Max output | 128,000 tokens | 128,000 tokens |
| Input | text, image | text, image |
| Released | 2026-09-22 | 2026-05-28 |
| Anthropic lifecycle | active, retires no sooner than 2027-09-22 | active, retires no sooner than 2027-05-28 |
| Formats | Anthropic SDK, OpenAI SDK | Anthropic SDK, OpenAI SDK |
| Developer | Anthropic | Anthropic |
List price: each developer's published rate, read October 2026. A model with no cached rate bills cached tokens at its input rate. Live from GET https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1/catalog. Lifecycle from Anthropic's model deprecations, read 2026-10-19.
What the same work costs · USD, here and at list
| Work | Claude Opus 5.5 | Claude Opus 4.8 |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 chat requests | $7.20list $18.00 | $6.75list $22.50 |
| 100 long documents | $11.70list $24.00 | $9.00list $30.00 |
| A month of both, daily | $567.00list $1,260.00 | $472.50list $1,575.00 |
A chat request is 2,000 input and 500 output tokens; a long document is 50,000 in and 2,000 out; the month is 1,000 chats and 100 documents a day for 30 days, uncached. Over that month Claude Opus 4.8 costs $94.50 less here.
Same key, same URL
One base URL and one key serve both models. The request below calls Claude Opus 5.5; put claude-opus-4-8 in the model field to call Claude Opus 4.8 instead.
shell
curl https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1/chat/completions \
-H "authorization: Bearer sk-uplink-live-..." \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"claude-opus-5-5","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'Model pages: Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Opus 4.8. Pricing by family: Claude. More comparisons: Claude Opus 5.5 vs GPT-6.1 Sol, Claude Opus 5.5 vs Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 vs Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5.5.
Questions
- Which costs less, Claude Opus 5.5 or Claude Opus 4.8?
- Claude Opus 5.5 costs less on output ($6.00 against $7.50 per million tokens); Claude Opus 4.8 costs less on input ($1.50 against $2.10).
- Can I switch between them by changing the model id?
- Yes. Both answer in the Anthropic SDK and OpenAI SDK format at the same base URL with the same key. Change the model id from claude-opus-5-5 to claude-opus-4-8 and nothing else.
- Is there a subscription?
- No. Prepaid credit from $10, with no subscription or monthly fee. Each top-up locks your prices for 30 days.
- Is Claude Opus 5.5 better than Claude Opus 4.8?
- Better depends on the job; this page compares what the catalog can measure. Claude Opus 5.5 costs less on output ($6.00 against $7.50 per million tokens); Claude Opus 4.8 costs less on input ($1.50 against $2.10). Both take 1,000,000 tokens of context. Claude Opus 5.5 is the newer release. Both run on the same key, so the fair test is your own prompt sent to each model id.