Opus 5.5 vs Sonnet 5: the pricier model wrote my code for about half the cost
Opus 5.5 lists at twice the price of Sonnet 5. In my coding agents it cost about half as much per line of code. It also replaced Fable 5.1 as my code reviewer, at about a third of the price. This post is the data behind that switch: five days of my own Claude Code transcripts, priced at API list prices, with the parts that are proven kept apart from the parts that are only likely. How I run…
The pricier Opus 5.5 model proved to be more cost-effective than the Sonnet 5 model when handling code generation tasks. While Opus 5.5 was twice the price of Sonnet 5, it produced code at about half the cost per line of code. Additionally, Opus 5.5 replaced Fable 5.1 as the primary code reviewer at a third of the price. This analysis is based on five days of data collected from Claude Code transcripts, which included API list prices and different performance metrics.
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