o4-mini vs Claude Sonnet 4.6: token pricing & cost compared (July 2026)

How o4-mini (OpenAI) and Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) actually compare on price — input, output, and total monthly cost at the MAU you care about. Updated against live OpenRouter pricing.

OpenAI

o4-mini

Input: $1.10 / 1M tokens
Output: $4.40 / 1M tokens
Output / Input ratio: 4.0×
Context window: 200K

Anthropic

Claude Sonnet 4.6

Input: $3.00 / 1M tokens
Output: $15.00 / 1M tokens
Output / Input ratio: 5.0×
Context window: 1,000K

The short answer

o4-mini is cheaper across the board for typical workloads.

Token pricing side-by-side

o4-mini
Claude Sonnet 4.6

Cost at your usage

Avg input tokens / call

Avg output tokens / call

Calls per active user / day: 5

Active days / month: 20

MAU: 1,000

o4-mini

Per call

$0.00275

Per user / mo

$0.2750

Total / mo

$275

Claude Sonnet 4.6

Per call

$0.00900

Per user / mo

$0.9000

Total / mo

$900

o4-mini is cheaper by $0.6250/user/month — a saving of $625/month at 1,000 MAU.

Total monthly bill across MAU

o4-mini
Claude Sonnet 4.6

Same usage profile applied to both models; only the per-token price differs.

Run this against your real numbers

The mini-calculator above is a preview. Use the full tools to model power-user blast radius, gross margin, and 12-month spend forecasts.

Other comparisons

DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Claude Sonnet 4.6 Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-5.1 Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Gemini 3.1 Pro o3 vs o4-mini Claude Opus 4.7 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6 Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Claude 3.7 Sonnet

Comparing o4-mini vs Claude Sonnet 4.6 on price alone never tells the whole story — output-token weighting, context length, and your usage profile change the answer dramatically. Use the calculators below for the full picture.