Your numbers are for “max”. Opus 5.0 “max” is $2.03. Opus 5.0 “high” (competitive with Claude 4.8 “max” on that index) is $1.06, less than the $1.80 you are quoting for 4.8 max.

That the most expensive variant is expensive doesn’t really tell us much.

Same answer i gave to somebody else up here...

If you start to drop effort levels, you need to compare to the competition models. So GPT models on the same ~intelligence level, are then 50% cheaper.

You see the issue? Its still a expensive model, and from my understanding, it still uses the old tokenizer.

Going to be interesting to see when GPT 6 comes out (very soon).