API prices / Compare

Claude Fable 5.1 vs Claude Sonnet 5: price

Claude Sonnet 5 is 5.0× cheaper than Claude Fable 5.1 for a typical chat workload (1,500 tokens in, 500 out).

ItemClaude Fable 5.1Claude Sonnet 5
Input per 1M tokens$10.00$2.00
Output per 1M tokens$50.00$10.00
Cached input per 1M$0.25$0.20
1,000 chat messages1,500 tokens in, 500 out each$40.00$8.00
Summarize a 50-page PDF30,000 tokens in, 1,000 out$0.35$0.07
One coding-agent task60,000 tokens in, 4,000 out, no caching$0.80$0.16

List prices checked September 28, 2026. Price is half the story: see how people rate each one today.

Claude Fable 5.1 vs Claude Sonnet 5 in numbers

Output, usually the bigger part of the bill, costs $50.00 on Claude Fable 5.1 and $10.00 on Claude Sonnet 5, so Claude Sonnet 5 is 5.0× cheaper there. Input costs $10.00 versus $2.00 per million tokens. For a coding-agent task (60,000 tokens in, 4,000 out) that is $0.80 on Claude Fable 5.1 and $0.16 on Claude Sonnet 5. Both accept up to 1M tokens of context. Claude Fable 5.1 came out on September 1, 2026 and Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30, 2026.

Both are Anthropic models. Estimate your own bill for both in the cost calculator.

Which one feels dumber today?

  1. –no votes yet
  2. –no votes yet

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Fable 5.1 or Claude Sonnet 5 cheaper?

Claude Sonnet 5 is 5.0× cheaper than Claude Fable 5.1 for a typical chat workload (1,500 tokens in, 500 out). Output, usually the bigger part of the bill, costs $50.00 on Claude Fable 5.1 and $10.00 on Claude Sonnet 5, so Claude Sonnet 5 is 5.0× cheaper there.

Which is better, Claude Fable 5.1 or Claude Sonnet 5?

It depends on the task, and price is only part of it. Check how people rate each one today on the Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Sonnet 5 pages, and read what users report in Discussions.