Is Claude Opus 4.5 a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Claude Opus 4.5 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 4.5 is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. Claude Opus 5 scores 54.4 higher at the same price, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
Claude Opus 5 scores 54.4 points higher than Claude Opus 4.5 at the same price, $10.00 per million tokens for both.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1450.5
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$10.00/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1504.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$10.00/M
Claude Opus 4.5 takes file, image, text, returns up to 64,000 tokens from a 200,000-token context, and is listed by 6 sellers.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 15 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Claude Opus 4.5 scores 1450.5 at $10.00 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 Opus 5 | 1504.9 +54.4 | $10.00/M | 0% |
| Claude Opus 4.6 | 1503.0 +52.5 | $10.00/M | 0% |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | 1494.7 +44.2 | $1.50/M | 85% |
| Gemini 3.7 Flash | 1490.5 +40.0 | $1.50/M | 85% |
| Claude Opus 4.7 | 1490.0 +39.5 | $10.00/M | 0% |
| Muse Spark 1.3 | 1489.7 +39.2 | $2.00/M | 80% |
| Muse Spark 1.1 | 1480.2 +29.7 | $2.00/M | 80% |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview | 1480.1 +29.6 | $4.50/M | 55% |
| Gemini 3.6 Flash | 1476.1 +25.6 | $1.50/M | 85% |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | 1475.7 +25.2 | $3.38/M | 66% |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | 1460.8 +10.3 | $10.00/M | 0% |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | 1458.3 +7.8 | $6.00/M | 40% |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro | 1457.8 +7.3 | $3.44/M | 66% |
| GPT-5.6 Sol | 1455.1 +4.6 | $4.00/M | 60% |
| GPT-5.4 | 1452.6 +2.1 | $5.63/M | 44% |
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 | file, image |
| 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 | file, image |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro | 1464.8 | $0.544/M | file, image |
The link keeps the model and mix, using the current catalogue. Monthly spend and switching cost stay in this browser tab and are left out of the link.
Saved decision references
Save the model, workload, catalogue date and capability-preservation rule in this browser. Spend, switching cost and bill contents are not saved. No account or notifications.
Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
Historical decisions cannot be fully replayed from saved references: past prices, scores and capability evidence are not stored.