Direct API pricing comparison
Claude Opus 5 vs Grok 4.5
Compare current direct API token prices and estimated monthly workload costs for Claude Opus 5 and Grok 4.5.
2direct models
Pricing only.Grok 4.5 is cheaper in 4 of 4 comparable standard workload presets below. This is a pricing comparison only; it does not rank model quality.
| Model | Input | Cached | Output | Context | Max output | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Claude Opus 5Anthropic · Direct API | $5 | $0.5 | $25 | 1M | 128K | Direct ↗ |
Grok 4.5xAI · Direct API | $2 | $0.3 | $6 | 500K | — | Direct ↗ |
Same workload, different API bill
These four presets use 30 active days, standard direct rates, no retries, no reasoning-token add-on, no cache writes, and the cached-input percentage shown in each row.
| Standard workload | Claude Opus 5 | Grok 4.5 | Lower monthly estimate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chat10,000/day · 2,000 in · 500 out · 25% cached | $6,075 | $1,845 | Grok 4.5 by $4,230 / mo |
| Coding2,000/day · 12,000 in · 1,800 out · 55% cached | $4,518 | $1,414.8 | Grok 4.5 by $3,103.2 / mo |
| Agent1,200/day · 32,000 in · 2,500 out · 65% cached | $4,640.4 | $1,571.04 | Grok 4.5 by $3,069.36 / mo |
| Documents400/day · 180,000 in · 2,000 out · 15% cached | $9,942 | $3,913.2 | Grok 4.5 by $6,028.8 / mo |
The main calculator includes batch mode, long-context rules, retries, reasoning tokens, cache writes, and other model-specific pricing logic that a static comparison cannot fully capture.