---
title: "Claude Sonnet 4.6 — API access"
description: "Claude Sonnet 4.6 API pricing: official $3/$15 per 1M tokens, $1.50/$7.50 with the flat 50% apiToken.sale discount. Proven balanced model on the same Anthropic API."
url: "https://apitoken.sale/models/claude-sonnet-4-6"
language: "en"
---
# Claude Sonnet 4.6

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the previous-generation balanced model — a proven workhorse for coding and production pipelines. Sonnet 5 is cheaper at $2/$10.

- **Model ID:** `claude-sonnet-4-6`
- **Tier:** Sonnet
- **Context window:** 200K tokens
- **Max output:** 128K tokens
- **Official price (per 1M):** $3 input / $15 output
- **Your price (per 1M):** input $1.5, output $7.5 (flat 50% off)
- **Base URL:** `https://router.apitoken.sale` · **Endpoint:** `POST /v1/messages`

## Best for

- Pipelines tuned and evaluated against Sonnet 4.6.
- Balanced coding and content workloads.
- Teams migrating gradually to Sonnet 5.

## Notes

- Sonnet 5 is cheaper at $2/$10 — new projects should usually start on claude-sonnet-5.
- Supports adaptive thinking; effort defaults to high.
- Context is 200K tokens on this endpoint. Anthropic returns a long-context rate_limit_error above roughly 200K on this model, so a longer document belongs on claude-sonnet-5 or claude-opus-4-6 — both answer the same document here (measured 2026-08-29).

## Call it

```bash
curl https://router.apitoken.sale/v1/messages \
  -H "x-api-key: $APITOKEN_API_KEY" \
  -H "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model": "claude-sonnet-4-6", "max_tokens": 1024, "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]}'
```

## FAQ

**How much does the Claude Sonnet 4.6 API cost?**

Officially $3 per 1M input tokens and $15 per 1M output tokens. With the flat 50% apiToken.sale discount that is $1.50/$7.50.

**Sonnet 4.6 or Sonnet 5?**

They do not share a list price: Sonnet 5 is $2/$10, Sonnet 4.6 is $3/$15. Sonnet 5 is also stronger on coding and agentic work — prefer it for new projects. Stay on 4.6 when your prompts and evals are pinned to it.

**How large a document can I send to Sonnet 4.6?**

About 200K input tokens. Above that Anthropic answers a long-context rate_limit_error on this model, and no retry helps. Send longer documents to claude-sonnet-5 or claude-opus-4-6. Note that the same text counts about 35% more tokens on Sonnet 5 than on 4.6, because the newer generation uses a different tokenizer.

**Can I switch models without a new key?**

Yes. One key and one prepaid balance cover every supported Claude and GPT model — switching is a model-ID and endpoint change.

---
API reference: https://apitoken.sale/md/docs · All models: https://apitoken.sale/md/models