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claude-sonnet-5vsgrok-4.6Both are available on APICLAN through one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so switching between them is a one-word change. Here is what each actually costs you, and how much the difference is worth at your volume.
grok-4.6 runs about
41% cheaper than claude-sonnet-5. Both models are from
different families.Percentages are easy to shrug off. Put your real monthly volume in and see the number in dollars.
At list these two charge exactly the same for input: $2.00 per million tokens. The entire gap sits in output, $10.00 against $6.00. So the only thing that changes your bill is what share of your tokens is output.
That share varies enormously between workloads. Two real ones from our own
logs: a claude-sonnet-5 workload, 176 requests, averaging 1,617
input and 671 output tokens — output is 29% of the tokens. And a
gpt-5.6-terra workload, 362 requests, averaging 5,377 input and
240 output — output is 4.3%.
Price the same two shapes against both models and the difference is not close. On the output-heavy shape, the cheaper output price takes about 27% off the bill. On the input-heavy shape it takes about 7% — because that bill is almost entirely input, and input costs the same either way.
So measure your own output share before you treat this as a cost question. Under roughly 10% and the price difference will not show up in your invoice; decide on whatever else matters to you. Above 25% and it is worth a real test.
We do not publish capability benchmarks, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does. Scores on public benchmarks rarely predict how a model behaves on your codebase, your prompts and your edge cases.
What we can tell you is exactly what each one costs. Run both against a real task from your own workload — switching takes one word — and let the cheaper one win unless it visibly fails.
A practical approach that works well in agent loops: route the bulk of calls to the cheaper model, and escalate to the more expensive one only when the first attempt fails a check. Most workloads are dominated by routine calls, so the blended cost lands close to the cheap model rather than the expensive one.
Same endpoint, same key, same request shape. Only the model string changes.
- model="claude-sonnet-5",
+ model="grok-4.6",If you have not connected yet, the quickstart takes about thirty seconds — you change your base URL and nothing else.
Prices verified 2026-10-10 and regenerated automatically from live billing data. List prices change; this page follows them.