Claude vs GPT, tier by tier
The two companies structure their lineups almost identically: a cheap, fast model for high-volume simple tasks, a balanced mid-tier model most production apps actually use, and a flagship reasoning model for the hardest problems. Comparing within the same tier is a more useful exercise than comparing flagships alone, since most real applications live in the budget or mid tier.
| Tier | Claude | Input / Output | GPT | Input / Output |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Budget | Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 / $5.00 | GPT-4.1 mini | $0.40 / $1.60 |
| Mid-tier | Claude Sonnet 5intro price thru Aug 31, 2026 | $2.00 / $10.00 | GPT-5.4 | $2.50 / $15.00 |
| Flagship | Claude Opus 4.8 | $5.00 / $25.00 | GPT-5.5 | $5.00 / $30.00 |
At the budget tier, GPT-4.1 mini is the cheaper of the two. At mid-tier, Claude Sonnet 5's introductory pricing currently undercuts GPT-5.4 on output cost. At flagship, the two are close on input price, GPT-5.5 runs higher on output. None of this settles which model is "better," capability varies by task, but for cost alone, the gap is usually smaller than people assume, the real cost driver tends to be which tier you pick, not which company you pick.
Every major provider, side by side
Beyond Claude and GPT, several providers are considerably cheaper for high-volume, simpler tasks. If your use case doesn't need frontier-level reasoning, it's often worth pricing it against these too.
| Model | Provider | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Anthropic | $1.00 | $5.00 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | Anthropic | $2.00 | $10.00 |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | Anthropic | $5.00 | $25.00 |
| Claude Fable 5 | Anthropic | $10.00 | $50.00 |
| GPT-4.1 nano | OpenAI | $0.10 | $0.40 |
| GPT-4.1 mini | OpenAI | $0.40 | $1.60 |
| GPT-4o | OpenAI | $2.50 | $10.00 |
| GPT-5.4 | OpenAI | $2.50 | $15.00 |
| GPT-5.5 | OpenAI | $5.00 | $30.00 |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | $0.10 | $0.40 | |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | $1.50 | $9.00 | |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | $2.00 | $12.00 | |
| Grok 4.20 | xAI | $1.25 | $2.50 |
| Grok 4.3 | xAI | $1.25 | $2.50 |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | DeepSeek | $0.28 | $0.42 |
| Llama 3.3 70B | Meta, via Groq | $0.59 | $0.79 |
| Mistral Small | Mistral AI | $0.20 | $0.60 |
DeepSeek V3.2, Mistral Small, and Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite are the cheapest general-purpose options here by a wide margin, useful to know if you're building something high-volume where per-request cost matters more than squeezing out the last bit of capability.
The number that actually decides your bill
A price-per-million-tokens table only tells half the story. Your actual monthly cost depends on how many tokens your specific prompts and responses use, and that varies a lot by use case. A model that's cheaper per token can still cost you more overall if it tends to write longer responses, or if your prompts are much larger than average.