TL;DR — the top-shelf duel: Fable 5 at $10/$50 vs GPT-5.5 at $5/$30 — Anthropic's apex costs 1.7–2× OpenAI's. Every number below is from our weekly-verified pricing tracker (verified 2026-08-26).
Pricing side by side (per 1M tokens, USD)
| Model | Provider | Input | Output | |-------|----------|-------|--------| | Claude Fable 5 | Anthropic | $10 | $50 | | GPT-5.5 | OpenAI | $5 | $30 |
Verified 2026-08-26 against official rate cards — the tracker keeps the change log.
What a real month costs
At a standard workload of 10M input + 2M output tokens/month:
- Claude Fable 5: $200.00
- GPT-5.5: $110.00
On this mix, GPT-5.5 is the cheaper column (1.8× gap). Your ratio will differ — run your own mix through the LLM cost calculator.
Choose Claude Fable 5 if
the absolute hardest calls justify the apex tier — and at that point you are buying capability, not comparing sticker prices.
Choose GPT-5.5 if
you want top-tier capability with a meaningfully lower ceiling price — GPT-5.5's $30 output vs $50 matters if apex-tier traffic isn't rare in your workload.
Routing decision card
- Apex tiers should be <5% of routed traffic — if either model is your default, the router is misconfigured
- At these prices, cache discipline (Anthropic ~90% cached input) and batch (−50%) are not optional
- Route to apex on failure escalation from Opus 5 / GPT-5.4, not on task-type guesses
- The router answer: most teams shouldn't hard-pick one — ClawRouters routes each request to whichever side fits it, so the comparison becomes a per-call decision instead of a bet.
Part of the LLM model comparison index. Prices move fast in 2026 — the tracker logs every change with dates.