Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5 on 24 July. The official price is five dollars per million input tokens and twenty-five per million output, the same as Opus 4.8 before it.
The model got faster and more economical on the same tasks, and it is now the default on Claude Max.
What actually changed
Three changes show up in practice:
- Speed. On long agentic runs the difference is visible without a stopwatch.
- Tools on the fly. The tool set used to be fixed at the start of a conversation; now it can change as the conversation goes.
- Automatic fallback. If the safety classifier flags a request, it goes to Opus 4.8 instead of failing.
When Opus is the wrong choice
The most common mistake is running the flagship on everything. Output costs five times as much as input, and the gap between Opus and the smaller models is wider still.
Opus earns its price where a task needs many relationships held at once: reading an unfamiliar repository, refactoring across a dozen files, chasing a race condition.
It is wasted on parsing a log, rewriting text, generating boilerplate from a pattern or classifying inbound messages. A smaller model does that just as well, for a fraction of the bill.
How your bill is computed
The formula is simple:
cost = (input_tokens × input_rate + output_tokens × output_rate) / 1,000,000
Many people miss this part: output costs five times as much as input. So a long context in the prompt almost always costs less than a long answer.
In practice, do not be afraid of putting plenty of context in. Be afraid of asking for a verbose answer out.
Three ways to pay less
One. Split models by task: Opus thinks, a smaller model does the mechanics.
Two. Ask for a short answer in the prompt itself. A line like "reply with code only, no explanation" cuts output tokens noticeably.
Three. Watch spend before the invoice arrives. A monthly cap with an alert at seventy percent beats a post-mortem.
What it costs in your case
Abstract rates say little. The site has a calculator: pick a model, enter your token volumes and see the total. Presets for typical scenarios are built in, and every field stays editable.
Access from Russia
A Russian card cannot pay Anthropic directly: the payment is cut off at the BIN level, before it reaches the service. Through codexkey, Opus 5 works with no Anthropic account and no VPN, and you can pay by SBP (the Russian Faster Payments System), card, MTS (the Russian mobile operator) or crypto.