A running table of Claude pricing changes

Why a static price comparison goes stale faster than people expect

A pricing comparison written once and left alone doesn't announce its own expiry — it just sits there, looking exactly as authoritative as it did the day it was published, while quietly drifting further from reality with every model release that touches pricing underneath it. The gap between "looks current" and "is current" is exactly where a lot of budgeting decisions go wrong, made against a number nobody thought to double-check because nothing about the page looked out of date.

What actually changes pricing, beyond an obvious rate change

The obvious case — a headline per-token rate going up or down — is the easiest one to notice and the least common cause of an actual bill surprise. The more common causes are quieter: a promotional introductory rate expiring on a fixed date nobody tracked as a follow-up item, a new model generation's tokenizer counting more tokens for the same text at an unchanged sticker price, a cache minimum shifting in a way that changes whether a given prompt qualifies for caching at all. None of these show up as "a price changed" in the way a headline rate move does, and all of them change what you actually pay.

Why this site treats pricing as something to track over time, not describe once

Every figure this site publishes is sourced from a single, dated module rather than typed by hand into any individual page, specifically so a change upstream updates every page that depends on it at once rather than requiring someone to hunt down every place a number was quoted. That's an infrastructure choice, not just an editorial one — it's the only way a site whose subject changes underneath it stays honest without a full manual audit every time something moves.

The freshness discipline behind it

This site's own build fails if any published figure goes too long without being re-checked against its source — not re-typed with a bumped date, but genuinely re-verified. That distinction matters: a date that gets updated without the underlying check actually happening converts an honest staleness signal into a confident lie, which is exactly the failure mode a freshness gate exists to prevent, and exactly the discipline a static, one-time pricing table can't enforce on itself at all.

What to actually watch for as a reader, not just as this site's own discipline

If you're maintaining your own internal cost model rather than relying on a published table anywhere, the same categories are worth tracking on your own calendar: any introductory rate's expiry date, any model migration that might have changed your effective token count even at an unchanged sticker price, and any cache-minimum shift that could silently change whether your prompts still qualify for caching after a model swap. None of these will announce themselves the way a headline price change does.

Why we don't publish a single frozen comparison table instead

A frozen table looks more authoritative on the day it's published and becomes actively misleading faster than a live one that pulls from a maintained source. Every comparison and calculator on this site draws from the same underlying facts module this page does, which means there's no separate, independently-decaying snapshot to fall out of sync — checking any tool here checks the current state, not a table from whenever this post happened to be written.

Why "a running table" is the wrong artifact, even as a concept

The title of this post is deliberately a little misleading, and it's worth naming why: a genuinely "running" table that's actually a static page still has exactly the staleness problem described above, just with better branding. A table that claims to run but is really a snapshot from whenever it was last hand-edited is arguably worse than a table that makes no such claim, because it invites more trust than it's earned. What you actually want isn't a page that promises to stay current — it's a page that structurally can't go stale, because it's rendering live from a source that's itself kept current, which is the only version of "running" that means anything.

See any model's reference page for its current, live figures rather than a snapshot, and what changes when an intro price expires for the specific, common case of a promotional rate lapsing without anyone tracking the date.