Claude Opus 5.5 Pricing vs Opus 5: Costs, Savings and the Thinking-Token Break-Even
💡 TL;DR / Summary — Claude Opus 5.5 Pricing (BLUF) Question: Is Claude Opus 5.5 actually cheaper than Opus 5, now that its thinking can’t be switched off? Measurement: From Anthropic’s official price list, the same token counts cost 20% to 35.5% less on Opus 5.5 across three workload shapes. The saving is larger when more of the input is cached. Catch: Thinking is billed as output. If Opus 5.5 produces more than +41.7% output for an uncached request (+32.3% for a cached session), it costs more than Opus 5. Rule: Switch cache-heavy agent work first; measure thinking_tokens before moving workloads that ran Opus 5 with thinking off. Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, 2026 at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, 20% below Opus 5, with cache reads cut 60% to $0.20. The announcement also states that Opus 5.5 “is also no longer available with ’thinking’ mode switched off.” ...