GPT-4o is 17% cheaper on input tokens ($2.50 vs $3.00 per 1M), but Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a 56% larger context window (200K vs 128K). The right choice depends on your workload — I break down the real costs for 5 common use cases below.
Head-to-Head Pricing Comparison
Real Cost by Use Case (Monthly)
Pricing per million tokens is misleading without real workload context. Here's what these models actually cost for 5 common scenarios at 10,000 requests/day:
When to Choose GPT-4o
- Budget is the priority — 17-31% cheaper for most workloads
- Creative writing and marketing copy — GPT-4o produces more natural text
- Multimodal tasks — GPT-4o's vision capabilities are more mature
- Token efficiency matters — o200k_base produces fewer tokens for same text
When to Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6
- Long documents — 200K context eliminates chunking overhead
- Code generation — Claude excels at structured, well-documented code
- Cached-prefix workloads — 90% cache discount vs OpenAI's 50%
- Safety-critical applications — Claude's constitutional AI approach
The Budget Alternative: Neither
If cost is your primary concern and you don't need top-tier reasoning, consider DeepSeek V3 at $0.27/$1.10 per 1M tokens — 89% cheaper than GPT-4o with surprisingly competitive quality for structured tasks.
For the full pricing breakdown of all 10 models, see our LLM Pricing Comparison 2026. To check exact token counts for your specific prompts, use our free token calculator.