Claude pelican comparison: Fable, Opus and Sonnet

Prompt: “Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle”. Five thinking-effort levels, shown from max to low.

Prices per 1M input/output tokens: Claude Fable 5.1 $10/$50; Claude Opus 5.5 $4/$20; Claude Opus 5 $5/$25; Claude Sonnet 5 $2/$10. Cached input: Fable 5.1 $0.25/M; Opus 5.5 $0.20/M.

Calculated costs use the supplied prices and logged token counts, including thinking tokens in the output total. Input is charged at the uncached rate because the source logs do not specify cached usage. Costs are rounded to two decimal places in cents. Fable runs: September 1, 2026; all other runs: September 22, 2026.

Effort	Claude Fable 5.1	Claude Opus 5.5	Claude Opus 5	Claude Sonnet 5
max	27 input tokens, 65,927 output = 329.66 cents 59,725 thinking tokens.	No SVG returnedThe response is empty. All 128,000 output tokens were thinking tokens. 27 input tokens, 128,000 output = 256.01 cents 128,000 thinking tokens.	25 input tokens, 13,207 output = 33.03 cents 8,976 thinking tokens.	25 input tokens, 69,340 output = 69.35 cents 66,485 thinking tokens.
xhigh	27 input tokens, 36,767 output = 183.86 cents 33,128 thinking tokens.	27 input tokens, 11,977 output = 23.96 cents 8,821 thinking tokens.	25 input tokens, 7,295 output = 18.25 cents 3,372 thinking tokens.	25 input tokens, 2,503 output = 2.51 cents 0 thinking tokens.
high	27 input tokens, 2,612 output = 13.09 cents 305 thinking tokens.	27 input tokens, 3,366 output = 6.74 cents 329 thinking tokens.	25 input tokens, 6,029 output = 15.09 cents 1,792 thinking tokens.	25 input tokens, 1,958 output = 1.96 cents 32 thinking tokens.
medium	27 input tokens, 1,977 output = 9.91 cents 0 thinking tokens.	27 input tokens, 2,941 output = 5.89 cents 220 thinking tokens.	25 input tokens, 3,496 output = 8.75 cents 586 thinking tokens.	25 input tokens, 2,168 output = 2.17 cents 0 thinking tokens.
low	27 input tokens, 1,998 output = 10.02 cents 0 thinking tokens.	27 input tokens, 1,891 output = 3.79 cents 0 thinking tokens.	25 input tokens, 1,780 output = 4.46 cents 22 thinking tokens.	25 input tokens, 1,370 output = 1.38 cents 0 thinking tokens.

Fable 5.1 thinking-token counts are inferred: logged output tokens minus the full response text counted by the Anthropic token-counting API, with a six-token message-overhead correction calibrated against the low and medium runs, which contain no reasoning blocks. The API provides estimates; these are not recorded usage breakdowns. Calculation details.

Source logs: Claude Fable 5.1 · Claude Opus 5.5. Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 were generated using llm -m anthropic/claude-MODEL-5 -o thinking_effort X -t pelican for each supported effort. All 19 SVGs are embedded in this page.