Claude Sonnet 5 vs Grok 4.6: API pricing
Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 against xAI's Grok 4.6 on price alone — per-token rates, caching, and context window. Run your own workload through both with the calculator below; capability differences are yours to judge on your evals.
| Claude Sonnet 5 | Grok 4.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $2.00 | $2.00 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.20 | $0.50 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $10.00 | $6.00 |
| Context window | 1M | 500K |
| Max output | 125K | 500K |
| Vendor | Anthropic | xAI |
Prices last synced Aug 20, 2026 from the LiteLLM community price catalog — the same catalog Marginal prices real usage events against, refreshed daily. Spot an error? Tell us.
Price takeaways
- Input: effectively the same price.
- Output: Grok 4.6 is 1.7x cheaper.
- Cached input: Claude Sonnet 5 is 2.5x cheaper.
- Ratios shift with workload shape — output-heavy traffic weights the output rate, cache-friendly traffic weights the cached rate. The calculator below does the arithmetic on your numbers.
Your workload on both
Your monthly workload
Cache hit rate = share of input tokens served from the provider's prompt cache, billed at the model's cached-input price. Estimates use standard per-token rates — batch discounts, service tiers, and long-context surcharges are not applied.
| Model | Input | Cached input | Output | Per request | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grok 4.6cheapest | $1,200 | $200 | $1,500 | $0.00580 | $2,900 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $1,200 | $80.00 | $2,500 | $0.00756 | $3,780 |
Related comparisons
Switching models? Watch the bill move in real time.
Marginal prices every call against that day's rates, so an A/B between these two shows up as dollars per customer and feature — not a surprise at month end.