Processing or generating 500,000 words (approximately 660,000 tokens) with Claude Opus 5 ranges from $0.33 (cached input) to $16.50 (full generation).
You send 500,000 words as prompt context, documentation, or background knowledge.
Claude Opus 5 drafts a complete 500,000 words article, chapter, or code module.
400,000 words input prompt + 100,000 words output reply.
| Model | Provider | Input Cost (500,000 words) | Cached Input Cost | Output Cost (500,000 words) | Context Limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5 (Current) | anthropic | $3.30 | $0.33 | $16.50 | 1,000,000 |
| GPT-5.6 Sol | openai | $3.20 | $0.32 | $19.20 | 1,050,000 |
| GPT-5.6 Cyber | openai | $8.00 | $0.80 | $48.00 | 1,050,000 |
| GPT-5.5 Standard | openai | $3.20 | $0.32 | $19.20 | 512,000 |
| GPT-5.5 Pro | openai | $19.20 | $1.92 | $115.20 | 512,000 |
| o3-pro (Frontier Reasoning) | openai | $12.80 | $1.28 | $51.20 | 1,000,000 |
For Claude Opus 5 (claude_bpe tokenizer), 500,000 words is approximately 660,000 tokens (an average ratio of 1.32 tokens per word in English). Code, technical vocabulary, and non-English scripts will have higher token densities.
Sending 500,000 words as input costs $3.30 (or $0.33 with prompt caching). Generating 500,000 words as output costs $16.50. Output tokens are more expensive because autoregressive token generation requires significantly more computation per token.
Yes! If your input text is part of a repeated context, prompt caching saves 50% to 90% (costing $0.33). For non-urgent asynchronous batch processing, 24-hour batch queues provide a flat 50% discount across all tokens (costing $1.65 for input, $8.25 for output).
At an average human reading speed of 250 words per minute, 500,000 words takes approximately 2000 minutes to read. In contrast, Claude Opus 5 can process or generate this text in seconds.