Claude (Anthropic) · sub-product

Claude API (developer platform)

Reach for this when you are wiring Claude into your own product or back-office and want production-grade behaviour.

Consilix rank 9/10

What it is

The Anthropic developer API at platform.claude.com. Three live tiers as of May 2026: Opus 4.8 (most capable, agentic, codebase-scale), Sonnet 4.6 (balanced, beats prior-generation Opus on coding evals), Haiku 4.5 (fast and cheap). Features include prompt caching, batch inference, files API, citations, extended thinking, tool use, and the Computer Use beta. The Claude Agent SDK is the recommended path for building agentic apps; the Files API and Batch API matter for any document-heavy workflow.

Key features

Prompt caching at five-times input cost discount on cached tokens, transformative for long-document workflows
Tool use and the Claude Agent SDK (TypeScript and Python) for production agent loops
Files API and citations for grounded document question-answering
Computer Use API for headless agentic browser and OS automation
Batch API at fifty percent discount for non-realtime jobs

Best use cases

Build a back-office document classifier over inbound supplier invoices using Haiku 4.5
Power a proposal-drafting microservice that grounds answers in a fixed corpus using Sonnet 4.6 with prompt caching
Run nightly batch summarisation of customer support tickets at half cost
Embed Claude into a custom CRM where the data cannot leave a UK-hosted environment via AWS Bedrock or Google Vertex
Build an in-house meeting summariser that takes Plaud transcripts and produces a structured Pydantic output

Weaknesses

Per-token cost is materially higher than Gemini or DeepSeek for equivalent jobs at the Opus tier; you need to be disciplined about routing easy work to Haiku or Sonnet. No native image generation endpoint; you wire in a separate provider. Rate limits on Tier 1 accounts feel tight for any genuine production workload.

Pricing

Haiku 4.5 at one US dollar input, five US dollars output per million tokens. Sonnet 4.6 at three US dollars input, fifteen US dollars output. Opus 4.7 at five US dollars input, twenty-five US dollars output. Opus 4.8 at the same headline pricing as 4.7. Prompt caching, batch, and contextual retrieval each carry separate discounts.

Claude (Anthropic)