Yeah, this is most directly comparable to xAI Grok 4.5. In both cases, directionally "opus level intelligence for haiku prices" which is a really big deal for application developers who want to include models like this in their applications. I have been testing switching out haiku and sonnet for Grok 4.5, and may give this a try too (it is quite a bit cheaper, particularly for cached).
> Yeah, this is most directly comparable to xAI Grok 4.5.
Grok 4.5 has a relatively high $0.50 per 1M cached input token rate, compared to $0.15 on this model.
Grok 4.5 cached input costs the same as Opus 4.8 cached input, which is going to make it a lot more expensive to use for multi-turn coding than many would assume from the $2/$6 headline numbers they led with.
> ... make it a lot more expensive to use for multi-turn coding than many would assume from the $2/$6 headline numbers they led with.
There's a further sting in the tail, Grok 4.5 is only $2/$6 for the first 200k of context. Go above that, and the pricing is $6 / $12 - and you're still capped at only 500k context anyway.
This is still ridiculously expensive imagine having to pay $10 for 100 search results on Google, thats essentially what this is.
I really dont see how anyone's willing spend more than $1.50 per mm output. Let alone $15-50. Does anyone actually pay for usage based billing as a consumer?
Sometimes. It depends on the task. $15/Mtok is still a lot cheaper than human written code. It’s probably worth spending more for contract reviews. Tasks don’t have uniform value. If you’re using an AI for entertainment, then frontier premiums are hard to justify. For paid work, they’re a great deal if used reasonably.