Comparison · prices as of 2026-07-04
Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
On price alone, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite (Google) runs about 97% cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.5 for a typical chat workload (2K input + 500 output tokens, 1,000 requests/day). Whether that's the right trade depends on the capability gap — pricing below, verify quality on your own evals.
| Spec | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite |
|---|---|---|
| Input / MTok | $3 | $0.10 |
| Output / MTok | $15 | $0.40 |
| Context window | 200K | 1M |
| Max output | 64K | 66K |
| Class | workhorse | fast |
| Reference workload / month | $405.00 | $12.00 |
Sources: Anthropic pricing · Google pricing. Run your own numbers in the cost calculator.