HEAD-TO-HEAD · FLAGSHIP-TIER · VERIFIED OCTOBER 3, 2026
Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs GPT-6.1 Sol: which is actually cheaper?
Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol launched a day apart and landed on an identical headline price: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. On paper, that makes this one of the rare true price ties in the flagship-tier market.
| Spec | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | GPT-6.1 Sol |
|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $2.00 | $2.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $10.00 | $10.00 |
| Context window | 1M | 1.05M |
The output price gap
There is no output price gap here — both models charge exactly $10 per million output tokens, and both charge $2 per million input tokens. For teams comparing sticker prices alone, this matchup is a wash; any real-world cost difference will come from secondary factors like cached-input rates and long-context surcharges rather than the base input/output rates themselves.
Context window
Claude Sonnet 5.5 ships with roughly a 1 million token context window, while GPT-6.1 Sol edges slightly ahead at approximately 1.05 million tokens. Both are large enough for most document-, codebase-, and long-conversation use cases, so the gap is unlikely to be a deciding factor for typical workloads — though GPT-6.1 Sol applies a surcharge (2x input, 1.5x output) once a single request passes 272K input tokens, whereas Sonnet 5.5 holds standard rates across its full window.
Worked example
At 100M input tokens and 30M output tokens in a month, the math is identical for both models at list price: input cost = 100M × $2/M = $200; output cost = 30M × $10/M = $300; total = $200 + $300 = $500/month for Claude Sonnet 5.5, and the same $200 + $300 = $500/month for GPT-6.1 Sol. At base rates, this workload costs exactly $500/month on either model — the tie-breaker for heavy, cache-light usage will come down to cached-input pricing (GPT-6.1 Sol's $0.10/M cache read vs Sonnet 5.5's $0.20/M) or long-context surcharges on large single requests.
Prices from the LLM Price Watch daily tracker, 2026-10-03. Prices change; use the calculator with your own usage for an exact comparison, or see the full price table for every tracked model.