So we all got Fable 5 in Claude Code this week and it’s good. But before everyone burns their entire week’s limit by Thursday, let’s talk numbers. API pricing per million tokens (input/output): Haiku 4.5: $1 / $5 Sonnet 4.6: $3 / $15 Opus 4.8: $5 / $25 Fable 5: $10 / $50 So Fable is exactly 2x Opus, and on our plans it draws down usage 2x faster than Opus too. For Claude Code that hits different, because agentic coding is the most token-hungry thing you can do. Long sessions, huge context, the model reading half your repo into the prompt. A few hours of Fable on a real codebase and your limits are gone. And the “included until June 22nd” thing is the part nobody is reading carefully. After June 23rd Fable needs usage credits at API rates on top of your subscription. So the actual question for us is: do you set up usage credits, or do you go back to Opus like the last two weeks never happened? The counterargument I keep seeing is that Fable finishes tasks in fewer turns and fewer tokens, so a 2x per-token price doesn’t mean 2x total cost. Maybe. On well-scoped tasks Opus already one-shots most things for me, so paying double for that feels pointless. Where Fable seems to earn it is the ugly stuff, the ambiguous multi-day refactors where Opus needs babysitting and Fable just goes. Also notice the pattern. Sonnet has been $3/$15 forever, Opus even got cheaper over time, but every generation a new tier appears on top at double the previous flagship. The model you can afford is always one tier below the model in the benchmarks. So what’s everyone’s setup going to be after the 22nd? Fable for planning and hard tasks with Sonnet doing the grunt work? Pure Opus? Has anyone actually compared total tokens for the same task between Fable and Opus? Because if the efficiency claim is real that changes the math, and if it’s not, this is just a 2x price hike with extra steps. submitted by /u/OccasionNo4703
Originally posted by u/OccasionNo4703 on r/ClaudeCode