Pricing Overview
Both Anthropic and OpenAI offer tiered model families with different price/performance trade-offs. Understanding these tiers is critical for optimising your AI API spend.
Cost Per Token Comparison
OpenAI’s flagship GPT-4o costs $2.50/$10.00 per 1M tokens (input/output). Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 costs $3.00/$15.00. For most tasks, the per-token cost difference is less important than choosing the right model tier.
The real savings come from matching task complexity to model capability. Claude Haiku at $0.25/$1.25 per 1M tokens handles classification and extraction tasks that many teams currently route to GPT-4o.
When to Choose OpenAI
OpenAI excels for teams that need the widest model selection (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, DALL-E, Whisper), have existing OpenAI integrations, or need function calling with complex tool use. GPT-4o-mini is particularly cost-effective for high-volume, lower-complexity tasks.
When to Choose Anthropic
Anthropic’s Claude models are preferred for long-context tasks (200K context window), nuanced writing and analysis, tasks requiring careful instruction-following, and safety-critical applications. Claude Haiku is one of the most cost-effective models for simple tasks.
The Multi-Provider Strategy
The most cost-effective approach isn’t choosing one provider — it’s using both strategically. CostLayer helps teams implement a multi-provider strategy by tracking costs across both platforms and recommending the optimal model for each use case.