Developer compares pricing and fit across four Claude models

On October 23, 2026, the AI section of DEV Community published a developer-written selection guide comparing Anthropic's four current Claude models: Claude Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5. The post notes that it was first published on saurabhbhayana.com.

The author's central argument comes from Anthropic's pricing page: the most expensive Claude model costs 100 times more per input token than the cheapest one. He observes that most people building on Claude never look at that gap. Instead, they pick the model they have heard of and pay for it on every request, including requests that a cheaper model would have handled just as well.

For each of the four models, the guide lays out what it is intended for, the full API pricing, the real-world cost of running tasks, and sample calling code. On that basis, the author recommends choosing a model by task rather than defaulting to the best-known one. The report does not disclose the specific per-token prices of the individual models, nor does it present measured cost data.