Is Claude Opus 4.1 a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Claude Opus 4.1 on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.
13 undominated of 136 · Sep 23, 2026
As of Sep 23, 2026, Claude Opus 4.1 is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. Claude Fable 5.1 scores 89.5 higher and costs 33% less, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
Claude Fable 5.1 is both better and cheaper than Claude Opus 4.1: 89.5 points higher on LMArena and 33% less per million tokens, $10.00 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1418.1
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$30.00/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1507.6
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$20.00/M
Claude Opus 4.1 takes image, text, file, returns up to 32,000 tokens from a 200,000-token context, and is listed by 1 seller.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 29 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Claude Opus 4.1 scores 1418.1 at $30.00 per million tokens for this mix.
Envelope-safe replacements
Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5.1 | 1507.6 +89.5 | $20.00/M | 33% |
| Claude Opus 5 | 1504.9 +86.8 | $10.00/M | 67% |
| Claude Opus 4.6 | 1503.0 +84.9 | $10.00/M | 67% |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | 1494.7 +76.6 | $1.50/M | 95% |
| Claude Fable 5 | 1492.6 +74.5 | $20.00/M | 33% |
| Gemini 3.7 Flash | 1490.5 +72.4 | $1.50/M | 95% |
| Claude Opus 4.7 | 1490.0 +71.9 | $10.00/M | 67% |
| Muse Spark 1.3 | 1489.7 +71.6 | $2.00/M | 93% |
| Muse Spark 1.1 | 1480.2 +62.1 | $2.00/M | 93% |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview | 1480.1 +62.0 | $4.50/M | 85% |
| Gemini 3.6 Flash | 1476.1 +58.0 | $1.50/M | 95% |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | 1475.7 +57.6 | $3.38/M | 89% |
| GPT-5.5 | 1465.6 +47.5 | $11.25/M | 63% |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | 1460.8 +42.7 | $10.00/M | 67% |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | 1458.3 +40.2 | $6.00/M | 80% |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro | 1457.8 +39.7 | $3.44/M | 89% |
| GPT-5.6 Sol | 1455.1 +37.0 | $4.00/M | 87% |
| GPT-5.4 | 1452.6 +34.5 | $5.63/M | 81% |
| Claude Opus 4.5 | 1450.5 +32.4 | $10.00/M | 67% |
| Grok 4.5 | 1450.1 +32.0 | $3.00/M | 90% |
| GPT-5.6 Terra | 1446.2 +28.1 | $4.50/M | 85% |
| GPT-6 Astra | 1443.7 +25.6 | $20.00/M | 33% |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | 1442.2 +24.1 | $4.00/M | 87% |
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | 1438.3 +20.2 | $6.00/M | 80% |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | 1435.5 +17.4 | $0.850/M | 97% |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | 1429.9 +11.8 | $0.450/M | 99% |
| Grok 4.6 | 1429.9 +11.8 | $3.00/M | 90% |
| GPT-5.1 | 1422.6 +4.5 | $3.44/M | 89% |
| Mistral Medium 3.5 | 1420.6 +2.5 | $3.00/M | 90% |
Higher score, lower price, named losses
Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You give up |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLM 5.3 | 1475.1 | $1.29/M | image, file |
| Kimi K3 | 1472.3 | $6.00/M | file |
| GLM 5.3 Flash | 1471.9 | $0.237/M | file |
| GLM 5.2 | 1466.9 | $0.998/M | image, file |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro | 1464.8 | $0.544/M | image, file |
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