# Claude Opus 4.5: pricing, crowd verdict, pros and cons (2026)

> Anthropic's Nov 2025 frontier coder: first to top 80% on SWE-bench Verified, priced 66% below Opus 4.1

Source: [GLAD-AI-TOR](https://glad-ia-tor.com) · Full page: https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-opus-4-5
Arena: llm-models · Crowd score: 50% recommend (0 votes, Bayesian-smoothed) · Price: $25/1M out

Anthropic's flagship reasoning and coding model released 2025-11-24. First model to break 80% on SWE-bench Verified (80.9%), launched with a 66% price cut vs Opus 4.1 and a new effort parameter. Now a legacy model, superseded by Opus 4.6 through 4.8 at the same API price.

## Key facts

- provider: Anthropic
- contextWindow: 200K tokens
- priceIn: $5/1M in
- priceOut: $25/1M out
- modalities: text, vision
- openWeights: no

## Ratings (editorial, 1-5)

- reasoning: 3.5/5
- coding: 3.5/5
- writing: 3.5/5
- speed: 2.5/5
- valueForMoney: 2.5/5

## Pros

- First model past 80% on SWE-bench Verified (80.9% at launch), beating Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.1 on real-world coding
- 66% price cut vs Opus 4.1 ($5/$25 vs $15/$75 per 1M tokens) made Opus-tier viable for production workloads
- 48-76% fewer output tokens than Sonnet 4.5 at matched or better quality, compounding the price cut
- Effort parameter (introduced with this model) lets devs trade reasoning depth for cost and latency per call
- Strong hands-on reports: one-shot complex refactors, caught race conditions other models missed, converged in ~4 agentic iterations vs ~10 for rivals
- +29% on Vending-Bench vs Sonnet 4.5, with fewer dead-ends on long-horizon autonomous tasks

## Cons

- 200K context window only (64K max output), far behind the 1M of Gemini 3 Pro and later Claude models; users reported selective attention above ~70% context fill
- Gated to $100-200/month Max tiers in Claude apps at launch; Pro subscribers were locked out and heavy users still hit limits (HN called it 'penny-wise and pound-foolish')
- Moderate latency; extended thinking adds cost and delay on simple tasks
- Superseded since early 2026: Opus 4.6/4.7/4.8 cost the same $5/$25 with 1M context and higher benchmarks, leaving 4.5 no price advantage
- Legacy API surface: manual budget_tokens extended thinking rather than the adaptive thinking of newer Claude models

## Best for

- agentic coding
- complex refactoring and debugging
- long-horizon autonomous agents
- workloads pinned to a stable legacy snapshot

## Verdict

Pick Claude Opus 4.5 only if you have a workload already tuned and pinned to this snapshot (claude-opus-4-5-20251101) and need stability. It was a landmark release, the first past 80% on SWE-bench Verified and a 66% price cut over Opus 4.1, but Anthropic now sells Opus 4.6 through 4.8 at the identical $5/$25 rate with a 1M context window and better scores. Anyone starting a new project should choose Opus 4.8 instead, and cost-sensitive users get near-Opus coding from Sonnet 5 at $3/$15 (intro $2/$10 through Aug 2026). Avoid it entirely if your prompts approach the 200K context ceiling.

## Pricing note

Official Anthropic API list price for claude-opus-4-5 (single tier, no long-context premium; 200K context, 64K max output); same $5/$25 rate as its Opus 4.6-4.8 successors; 50% batch discount and prompt caching apply. Verified against platform.claude.com models overview 2026-07.

## Alternatives and head-to-heads

- [Claude Haiku 4.5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-haiku-4-5) (crowd score 67%) · [Claude Opus 4.5 vs Claude Haiku 4.5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/claude-opus-4-5-vs-claude-haiku-4-5)
- [Claude Fable 5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-fable-5) (crowd score 63%) · [Claude Opus 4.5 vs Claude Fable 5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/claude-opus-4-5-vs-claude-fable-5)
- [Claude Opus 4.7](https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-opus-4-7) (crowd score 57%) · [Claude Opus 4.5 vs Claude Opus 4.7](https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/claude-opus-4-5-vs-claude-opus-4-7)
- [Claude Sonnet 5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-sonnet-5) (crowd score 57%) · [Claude Opus 4.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/claude-opus-4-5-vs-claude-sonnet-5)

Full ranking: https://glad-ia-tor.com/hall-of-fame/llm-models

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