Grok 4.6 vs Claude Sonnet 5.5
Grok 4.6 costs less on both: $0.60 in and $1.80 out per million tokens, against $1.20 in and $3.00 out for Claude Sonnet 5.5. Both on one key at UplinkSwitch, each next to its developer's list price.
Prices · per million tokens, USD
| Tokens | Grok 4.6grok-4.6 | Claude Sonnet 5.5claude-sonnet-5-5 |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.60xAI lists $2.00 · 70% under | $1.20Anthropic lists $2.00 · 40% under |
| Cached input | $0.15xAI lists $0.50 · 70% under | $0.075Anthropic lists $0.10 · 25% under |
| Output | $1.80xAI lists $6.00 · 70% under | $3.00Anthropic lists $10.00 · 70% under |
| Context window | 500,000 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Max output | — | 128,000 tokens |
| Input | text, image | text, image |
| Released | 2026-08-12 | 2026-09-28 |
| Anthropic lifecycle | — | active, retires no sooner than 2027-09-28 |
| Formats | OpenAI SDK | Anthropic SDK, OpenAI SDK |
| Developer | xAI | 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 | Grok 4.6 | Claude Sonnet 5.5 |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 chat requests | $2.10list $7.00 | $3.90list $9.00 |
| 100 long documents | $3.36list $11.20 | $6.60list $12.00 |
| A month of both, daily | $163.80list $546.00 | $315.00list $630.00 |
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 Grok 4.6 costs $151.20 less here.
Same key, same URL
One base URL and one key serve both models. The request below calls Grok 4.6; put claude-sonnet-5-5 in the model field to call Claude Sonnet 5.5 instead.
shell
curl https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1/chat/completions \
-H "authorization: Bearer sk-uplink-live-..." \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"grok-4.6","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'Model pages: Grok 4.6, Claude Sonnet 5.5. Pricing by family: Grok, Claude. More comparisons: Grok 4.6 vs GPT-6.1 Sol, Grok 4.6 vs Grok 4.5, Grok 4.6 vs Claude Opus 5, Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs GPT-6.1 Sol.
Questions
- Which costs less, Grok 4.6 or Claude Sonnet 5.5?
- Grok 4.6 costs less on both: $0.60 in and $1.80 out per million tokens, against $1.20 in and $3.00 out for Claude Sonnet 5.5.
- Can I switch between them by changing the model id?
- Yes. Both answer in the OpenAI SDK format at the same base URL with the same key. Change the model id from grok-4.6 to claude-sonnet-5-5 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 Grok 4.6 better than Claude Sonnet 5.5?
- Better depends on the job; this page compares what the catalog can measure. Grok 4.6 costs less on both: $0.60 in and $1.80 out per million tokens, against $1.20 in and $3.00 out for Claude Sonnet 5.5. Grok 4.6 takes 500,000 tokens of context against 1,000,000 for Claude Sonnet 5.5. Claude Sonnet 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.