What a task costs on Opus 5.5

You don't set out to buy millions of tokens. You set out to build a feature, finish a migration, or run a task. The token count is whatever the model needed to get there. Two models with the same cost per token can cost very different amounts on the same task. One reads the code once. The other reads it, tries a fix, and reads it again. Each of those steps is a turn, and each turn resends the conversation so far. So the model that needs more turns costs more, even at the same price.

Published by Claude Blog. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.