[johndough]

It's interesting that the cost multiplier for Claude Sonnet 4/4.5/4.6 varies so much (1/6/9), while the API cost is exactly the same for all three models.

Also, the multiplier of 27 for Claude Opus 4.6/4. is way higher than the increase in API price would suggest.

I wonder why that is.

[vanviegen]

On GitHub copilot you pay per prompt. More powerful models can do a lot more work (consuming a lot more tokens) per prompt. Also, they tend to use more thinking tokens.

[johndough]

> More powerful models can do a lot more work (consuming a lot more tokens) per prompt.

That is not my experience. Each model since at least GPT-4 can fill up an entire context window. In fact, more powerful models can solve tasks faster, so their ratio of multiplier to API price should decrease, not increase.

For example, Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a multiplier of 9 and an API price of $15, which is 0.6 multiplier per dollar.

Claude Opus 4.7 has an API price of $25, so it should have a multiplier of 25 * 0.6 = 15 when extrapolating from Sonnet, but the multiplier is 27.

> Also, they tend to use more thinking tokens.

That might be it. Is there any data on this somewhere?

[port11]

> Is there any data on this somewhere?

Anecdata: for me, this is exactly the case with Opus. It _really_ thinks, looks into more sources, more of the codebase, etc. Sonnet is 80% thorough, but Opus can go the extra mile and burns a ton of tokens doing so.