Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 4.6
8.0
out of 10
Anthropic's mid-tier model and the practical daily-driver recommendation. Sonnet 4.6 sits just below Opus in raw intelligence but costs 80% less. It's the best model for writing, analysis, and long-document work for anyone who isn't running enterprise-scale inference.
Context window
200K tokens
API (blended)
$6.00/1M
Consumer access
Free (limited) / $20/mo
Multimodal
Yes
Strengths
- +Best writing quality of any mainstream model
- +Highly reliable instruction-following
- +200K context handles most real-world long-document tasks
- +Strong at nuanced reasoning and analysis
- +More honest about uncertainty than most models
Weaknesses
- -Most expensive API in the group at $6/1M blended
- -Smallest context window of the six models reviewed
- -No image generation capability
Best for
writingeditinganalysislong documentsresearch synthesis
Not ideal for
real-time dataimage generationultra-budget API use
Pricing details
Subscription plans
FreeClaude Sonnet access with daily limits(Message cap; no file uploads; no Projects)
FreePro5x more usage, Projects, file uploads, priority access during peak hours
$20/moTeamAll Pro features, admin console, centralized billing, higher rate limits
$25/mo (annual)API pricing
AnthropicPrompt caching: cached input at $0.30/1M. Batch API: 50% discount.
$3/$15OpenRouterSmall markup over direct Anthropic pricing.
$3.1/$15.5AWS BedrockSame pricing as direct. Useful if already on AWS.
$3/$15Google Vertex AISame pricing as direct. Useful if already on GCP.
$3/$15Prices verified February 2026. LLM pricing changes frequently — verify at the provider's site before budgeting.
Last updated: February 2026