I Ran Opus 4.6 and 4.7 on the Same 10 Prompts at 1M Context. The Newer Model Cost 2.17x More

Anthropic just shipped Claude Opus 4.7. Both it and Opus 4.6 now run at 1 million tokens of context. If you pay for Claude Code, the obvious question is: should I switch my default from 4.6 to 4.7?I opened a fresh Claude Code session, typed one command, walked away, and four minutes later I had the answer. Same 10 prompts, one run on each model, both at 1M context, both at the effort level the model ships with by default. Apples-to-apples.Short version: Opus 4.7 cost 2.17x more than 4.6 for the same 10 prompts. Instruction-following went up 11.1 percentage points. One single prompt cost 15.70x more on the newer model. For the work I do day to day, that trade might not be worth it. However, Anthropic has also raised paid subscription users’ usage limits to account for the increased token usage by Opus 4.7. So if your usage scenarios benefit from Opus 4.7 over Opus 4.6, it still might be worth it. Test and find out.The longer version, with per-prompt numbers and a framework for when the…