Claude Opus 4.6 pricing is published by Anthropic and varies depending on how much context you send and which pricing tier applies. Anthropic’s announcement highlights premium pricing for prompts exceeding certain large-token thresholds, and pricing is typically defined per million input tokens and per million output tokens. In practice, the cost you pay is driven by three levers: input size, output size, and whether you use premium long-context options.
From a budgeting perspective, the easiest mistake is underestimating output tokens and long-context overhead. If you allow 128K output tokens, you must cap it tightly for most products, because long outputs can dominate cost quickly. Similarly, if you push prompts into very large context ranges, you can increase spend significantly even when the user asks a simple question. A practical approach is to enforce a per-request token budget and tier it by user plan.
The best way to reduce cost without sacrificing quality is to retrieve less and prompt better. Use Milvus or managed Zilliz Cloud to fetch only the most relevant context, and pass short, well-structured chunks instead of entire documents. Pair that with output controls: keep max output tokens aligned with what your UI can show and what the user actually needs.