Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tiberium | Hacker News Reader

The pricing is insane: $1.25/$4.5 for 1M tokens, and $0.15 for cached input!

https://dev.meta.ai/docs/getting-started/pricing-rate-limits

Yeah, this is most directly comparable to xAI Grok 4.5. In both cases, directionally "opus level intelligence for haiku prices" which is a really big deal for application developers who want to include models like this in their applications. I have been testing switching out haiku and sonnet for Grok 4.5, and may give this a try too (it is quite a bit cheaper, particularly for cached).

> Yeah, this is most directly comparable to xAI Grok 4.5.

Grok 4.5 has a relatively high $0.50 per 1M cached input token rate, compared to $0.15 on this model.

Grok 4.5 cached input costs the same as Opus 4.8 cached input, which is going to make it a lot more expensive to use for multi-turn coding than many would assume from the $2/$6 headline numbers they led with.

> ... make it a lot more expensive to use for multi-turn coding than many would assume from the $2/$6 headline numbers they led with.

There's a further sting in the tail, Grok 4.5 is only $2/$6 for the first 200k of context. Go above that, and the pricing is $6 / $12 - and you're still capped at only 500k context anyway.

Here's the xAI pricing on OpenRouter:

https://openrouter.ai/x-ai/grok-4.5?endpoint=0e927811-b1a8-4...

Cheaper than Qwen 3.7 Max. Second indication, after Grok 4.5 ($2 in / $6 out), that the BigLabs are feeling the GLM 5.2 heat.

The cached input pricing is a good ratio.

Compare with Grok 4.5 which came out at $2/$6 but then quietly charges $0.50 per 1M cached input tokens. That's as high as Opus 4.8!

Meta isn’t right now on the radar for most folks picking models.

If they have a really good model, it makes sense to subsidise it, to gain users, before they align prices with competitors.

this is not subsidizing. this is way too expensive for a no-name model.

Depends on the quality

just played around, it is pretty low quality. lower than sonnet.

is that a lot or a little

This is still ridiculously expensive imagine having to pay $10 for 100 search results on Google, thats essentially what this is.

I really dont see how anyone's willing spend more than $1.50 per mm output. Let alone $15-50. Does anyone actually pay for usage based billing as a consumer?

This is pretty cheap compared to anthropic opus and fable.

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing

Model Base Input Tokens 5m Cache Writes 1h Cache Writes Cache Hits & Refreshes Output Tokens

Claude Fable 5 $10 / MTok $12.50 / MTok $20 / MTok $1 / MTok $50 / MTok

Claude Opus 4.8 $5 / MTok $6.25 / MTok $10 / MTok $0.50 / MTok $25 / MTok

Note Fable costs $50 MTok and Opus 4.8 costs $25 / MTok.

Yeah, DeepSeek V4 (Flash and Pro) is below $0.004 for 1M cache hits.

Even with usage based billing I'm below $1 writing code all day.

Yes, this is the only pricing that seems sustainable

What harness do you use to get that? Reasonix?

> I'm below $1 writing code all day.

same, pi as a harness works best, better than claude code and open code.

Sometimes. It depends on the task. $15/Mtok is still a lot cheaper than human written code. It’s probably worth spending more for contract reviews. Tasks don’t have uniform value. If you’re using an AI for entertainment, then frontier premiums are hard to justify. For paid work, they’re a great deal if used reasonably.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com