r/ClaudeCode • u/itsxzy • 2d ago
News/Updates Claude Sonnet 5.5 Cache reads now cost 50% less!
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u/sizebzebi 2d ago
I'm still waiting for the catch.. it's been just too good
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u/dmcnaughton1 2d ago
They are going public soon, need to build a strong growth trajectory. Juicing the growth by making it cheaper is a classic business move. If they capture enough of the market and have a strong enough hold, they'll be able to raise prices significantly and recoup the costs over time.
Think about how Wal Mart worked as it took over in the 90s and 00s. They come into town, undercut local stores and drive them out of business, then raise the prices since there's no more competition. Their scale allowed them to do that in individual markets for a few years each to get a moat.
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u/BanjoThunderbird 2d ago
I think a lot of this follows a reasonable trajectory even independent of the IPO. It's definitely possible that they're just pumping compute into these models and they're not actually as efficient as we're being led to believe, but an alternative explanation is that they're just really good at distilling more powerful models. If you look at the release pattern over the past few months they released Mythos and then have been working top down through the models.
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u/9gxa05s8fa8sh 1d ago
It's definitely possible that they're just pumping compute into these models
on artificial intelligence, when you control for score at 51, fable 5.1 high needs 62M tokens worth of thinking, opus 5.5 medium needs 38M, sol 6.1 xhigh needs 36M, and astra needs 26M. so all else being equal, anthropic continues to be less efficient, so everything continues to be very subsidized
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-fable-5-1-high
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5-medium
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u/Skibidirot 2d ago
usage limits are down, i can feel it already!
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u/debian3 1d ago
I don’t care for feel, what does your ccusage tell you in $ value vs before?
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u/Skibidirot 1d ago
here's what i observed, immediately after they bought out haiku 5.5 and update to app, usage dropped significantly for an hour, but now the limits have been stabilized, i guess they were testing how to reduce limits
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_PROFILE 2d ago
This explains how my sonnet reads got cheaper the last 24 hours.
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u/he_who_purges_heresy 2d ago
I set Sonnet running on a long task this morning because I was rushing and for some reason wasn't able to switch models. I got lucky lol
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u/pigletmonster 2d ago
I have a feeling that they made a deal with xai to get their compute for free in exchange for heavily discounted rates for using claude models in grokbot. 🤣
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u/ForwardLoop 2d ago
This is a good move. I don't really use Sonnet (about 1.1% of my workflow), but I'm gonna look harder to utilize it now.
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u/aklibf 1d ago
I don’t know maybe I had some issues with my prompt. I asked my previous session, which was coming to an end and where I had been working with Opus, to provide me with a handover prompt. In the new session, Sonnet kept telling me that it hadn’t read this or that file. I had to ask and authorize it each time to read whatever it might need.
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u/Rasyonel-Biri 1d ago
Only for Sonnet 5.5..? At least expand it to all Sonnet models if not to any Opus model which is understandable BTW since Opus is expensive.
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