OpenRouter breaks down what a Claude Code session actually costs by model
OpenRouter published session-cost data for Claude Code from its own platform telemetry covering the 30 days to October 18, 2026, reporting median costs of $0.31 for a 2-to-9-turn session on Claude Opus 5.5 and $0.16 on Claude Sonnet 5.5, with under a cent on Haiku 5.5. In a controlled bug-fixing test on a small invoicing library, all three Claude models fixed every bug, with median per-session costs of $0.098 on Opus 5.5, $0.062 on Sonnet 5.5 and $0.0052 on Haiku 5.5. The post also shows how to run Claude Code through OpenRouter's Ori Harness with per-session model selection, a cost-tracking statusline and credit limits or workspace budgets.
It gives Claude Code users concrete per-session cost medians and shows that most of the bill comes from prompt-cache reads of the tool's own context, while the data comes from a single vendor's telemetry and is not independently confirmed.
How Much Does Claude Code Cost? Real Session Costs by Model
OpenRouter ·10/30/2026
Claude Code is free to install. What you pay for is the model it calls. If you run Claude Code on an API key, a short session of 2 to 9 turns with Claude Opus 5.5 costs $0.31 at the median, and a long session of 10 to 49 turns costs $1.39. The same sessions with Claude Sonnet 5.5 cost $0.16 and $0.60.
Those medians come from real Claude Code sessions on OpenRouter in the 30 days to October 18, 2026. Claude Code was the top app in our daily app ranking on October 21, so there’s a lot of usage behind them. Below, we use that data to show what a session costs on each model, then how to run Claude Code on OpenRouter so you can pick the model for each session, see what it cost, and cap your spend.
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