Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Fable 5 or Claude Sonnet 4.6 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Fable 5 costs 3.3x as much as Claude Sonnet 4.6 per request ($0.32 vs $0.097 on our measured traffic), because every Claude Fable 5 rate is 3.3 times Claude Sonnet 4.6's.

List prices: Anthropic pricing, checked 2026-10-13. Request costs: Standard Compute gateway data, 79,301 coding-agent requests from 75 users, Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026. How we compute this

Run Claude Fable 5, Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Sonnet 5.5 in your agent from $19/month

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Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list price	Sonnet 4.6	Fable 5
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.047	$0.16
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.12	$0.39
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.26	$0.87
Average request	$0.097	$0.32
100 requests	$9.74	$32.47
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$1.35	$4.49
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$149	$497

Each logged request priced at the vendor’s list rates for its own token counts, including cache reads and any higher rate for long prompts. Average output: 698 tokens per request.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	Sonnet 4.6	Fable 5
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	30	50
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	3.0%	42.4%
Output speedmedian	57 tokens/s	67 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	101 s	2.3 min

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max), speed on Anthropic; Claude Fable 5 (Max, Opus 4.8 Fallback), speed on Anthropic. Fetched October 13, 2026. Artificial Analysis runs Terminal-Bench 4.0 in its own setup, so its scores differ from the tbench.ai leaderboard.

What to watch for

Claude Fable 5 is superseded: Claude Fable 5.1 costs $0.24 per request. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is superseded: Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs $0.053 per request. Claude Fable 5 scores clearly higher on the benchmarks above, so it may finish hard tasks in fewer steps.

FAQ

Is Claude Sonnet 4.6 cheaper than Claude Fable 5 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $9.74 on Claude Sonnet 4.6 and $32.47 on Claude Fable 5. A median 16-request session costs $1.35 vs $4.49. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of Fable 5 vs Sonnet 4.6 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $497 on Claude Fable 5 and $149 on Claude Sonnet 4.6 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6: which is better for agents?

Claude Fable 5 scores higher on output quality (9.0/10 vs 6.4/10), while Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the cheaper option. Claude Fable 5 is best for existing Fable 5 setups that have not yet moved to Fable 5.1 or Opus 5.5; Claude Sonnet 4.6 is best for existing Sonnet 4.6 setups until they move to Sonnet 5.5. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Claude Fable 5 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 in the same agent?

Yes. Model-agnostic agents (Cline, Aider, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, Kilo Code, OpenCode) let you swap models per task. Many people route hard tasks to the stronger model and routine work to the cheaper one.

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.

Output Quality

Correctness and depth of what it produces

Agentic Ability

Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks

Speed

Tokens per second and time-to-first-token

Value for Money

How much capability you get per dollar

Reliability

Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Current Claude, GPT, Gemini and open models are included with Standard Compute

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Current frontier models Claude Fable 5.1 · GPT-6 Astra

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Each step goes to the cheapest model that can do it, on providers we vet for price, uptime and speed, with automatic fallback when one fails.

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