# Claude Opus 5.5 vs Qwen3.8-Flash

Qwen3.8-Flash is the cheaper of the 2: for the same tokens, 3 read for each 1 written, Claude Opus 5.5 costs 35 times as much. Below are both price lists, what 8 everyday jobs cost a month on each, and how many tokens the same text takes on each, which can change the answer.

- Page, with a calculator for your own job: https://tecyfy.com/prices/compare/claude-opus-5-5-vs-qwen3-8-flash
- Makers: Claude Opus 5.5 from Anthropic, Qwen3.8-Flash from Alibaba

## Price per million tokens, in US dollars

| | Claude Opus 5.5 | Qwen3.8-Flash |
| --- | --: | --: |
| Input | $4 | $0.15 |
| Cached input | $0.20 | $0.016 |
| Cache write | $5 | not listed |
| Output | $20 | $0.47 |
| Blend, 3 read for each 1 written | $8 | $0.23 |
| Batch input | $2 | not listed |
| Batch output | $10 | not listed |
| Context window, tokens | 1M | not listed |
| Capability score (Epoch Capabilities Index; GPT-5 is 150) | 167 | not listed |
| Longest answer, tokens | 128K | not listed |

## The same text, counted by each maker

Our lesson "How AI writes" (https://tecyfy.com/learn/how-ai-works/how-ai-writes), about 1,700 words of English:

- Claude Opus 5.5: about 2,100 to 3,600 tokens. Anthropic does not publish its tokenizer. It says Claude 4.7 and later produce about 30 percent more tokens for the same text than earlier models, and an independent test counted TypeScript at 1.73 times OpenAI's figure. The range runs from OpenAI's count to 1.75 times it.
- Qwen3.8-Flash: about 2,100 tokens. Counted with the tokenizer Alibaba publishes with its open Qwen3.8 models. Alibaba does not say its API models use the same one, so the count is marked as about.

## What 8 everyday jobs cost a month on each

Each job at its usual runs a day, for 30 days, at the standard price.

| Job | Tokens in, out, runs a day | Claude Opus 5.5 | Qwen3.8-Flash |
| --- | --- | --: | --: |
| A chat question | 300, 500, 100 | $33.60 | 84 cents |
| A hard question, with thinking | 300, 1,400, 100 | $87.60 | $2.11 |
| A long report, summarised | 60,000, 2,000, 20 | $168 | $5.96 |
| A 40-turn agent task | 2,800,000, 40,000, 10 | $727 | $30.34 |
| A support bot's reply | 4,000, 300, 2,000 | $864 | $28.38 |
| Sort a message into a category | 250, 5, 50,000 | $1,650 | $59.77 |
| Read an invoice into fields | 1,500, 250, 1,000 | $330 | $10.27 |
| Review a pull request | 25,000, 4,500, 50 | $285 | $8.80 |

## Questions

### Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 5.5 or Qwen3.8-Flash?

Qwen3.8-Flash is cheaper: $0.15 per million tokens read and $0.47 per million written, against $4 and $20 on Claude Opus 5.5. On a mix of 3 tokens read for each 1 written, Claude Opus 5.5 costs 35 times as much.

### Which is better, Claude Opus 5.5 or Qwen3.8-Flash?

Claude Opus 5.5 scores 167 on the Epoch Capabilities Index, an independent score from Epoch AI that combines over 50 benchmarks (GPT-5 is 150). Qwen3.8-Flash has no independent score yet, so the only fair test is to run the same 10 tasks on both.

### What does a support bot cost a month on Claude Opus 5.5 and Qwen3.8-Flash?

At 2,000 replies a day, each reading 4,000 tokens (50 percent of them from cache) and writing 300, it costs $864 a month on Claude Opus 5.5 and $28.38 on Qwen3.8-Flash: Claude Opus 5.5 costs 30 times as much for this job.

### What does an AI agent task cost on Claude Opus 5.5 and Qwen3.8-Flash?

One 40-turn task that reads 2,800,000 tokens in all, 90 percent of them from cache, and writes 40,000, costs $2.42 on Claude Opus 5.5 and 10 cents on Qwen3.8-Flash. At 10 tasks a day that is $727 and $30.34 a month.

### Does the same text take the same number of tokens on Claude Opus 5.5 and Qwen3.8-Flash?

No. Our lesson "How AI writes", 1,700 words long, is about 2,100 to 3,600 tokens on Claude Opus 5.5 and about 2,100 on Qwen3.8-Flash. Each maker cuts text its own way, and every extra token is paid for at the model's price.

### Can I pay less on Claude Opus 5.5 and Qwen3.8-Flash for work that can wait?

On Claude Opus 5.5 only: with a batch, where you collect the answers later, it costs $2 per million tokens read and $10 written. Alibaba's price page lists no batch price for Qwen3.8-Flash.

## Sources

- [Anthropic: API prices](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing)
- [Alibaba: API prices](https://www.qwencloud.com/pricing/api)
- [Epoch Capabilities Index, by Epoch AI (CC BY 4.0)](https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/eci)

## Other comparisons

- [Claude Mythos 5.1 vs Claude Opus 5.5](https://tecyfy.com/prices/compare/claude-mythos-5-1-vs-claude-opus-5-5.md)
- [Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Opus 5.5](https://tecyfy.com/prices/compare/claude-fable-5-vs-claude-opus-5-5.md)
- [Claude Mythos 5 vs Claude Opus 5.5](https://tecyfy.com/prices/compare/claude-mythos-5-vs-claude-opus-5-5.md)
- [Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Opus 5.5](https://tecyfy.com/prices/compare/claude-opus-5-vs-claude-opus-5-5.md)
- [Claude Opus 4.8 vs Claude Opus 5.5](https://tecyfy.com/prices/compare/claude-opus-4-8-vs-claude-opus-5-5.md)
- [Claude Opus 4.7 vs Claude Opus 5.5](https://tecyfy.com/prices/compare/claude-opus-4-7-vs-claude-opus-5-5.md)