We called Claude Opus (claude-opus-5-5) 209 times over 10 days, from 2026-10-30 to 2026-11-08. Those calls covered 22 different jobs and cost $23.7465 in total, or $0.11362 per call. The median call took 18.1 seconds.
For comparison, Claude Sonnet (claude-sonnet-5-5) ran 156 times in the same window at $0.0165 per call, with a median of 2.3 seconds and a slowest call of 19.2 seconds. Opus cost about 7 times Sonnet per call. Its median ran about 8 times longer.
The cheaper models took the parsing, listing copy, captions and extraction. The facts do not say how we chose that split, so we will not claim it was measured.
Opus had one failure in 209 calls, 0.5 percent. The record does not say what was wrong with the output, and it does not say whether the 312.2 second call and the failed call were the same one.
When you size a timeout or a budget for Opus, use the slowest call you have seen rather than the median, and price it per call across every job it touches.
Originally published at neuragrowth.co. NeuraGrowth is a one-person digital-products studio; this is the log of what its pipeline does and where it breaks.
