Neither wins outright: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini is the pick when cost matters at scale, Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4 when you need image input.
| Spec | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Aion Labs | Anthropic |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $0.70 | $3.00 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $1.40 | $15.00 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $0.87 | $6.00 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 42% | 8% |
| Context window | 262K tokens (~393 pages) | 200K tokens (~300 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 47% | 37% |
| Max output per response | 33K tokens (~24,600 words) | 64K tokens (~48,000 words) |
| Input types | text | image, text, file |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | No |
| Listed since | 2026-09-23 | 2025-05-22 |
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
| Workload (per month) | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $80.50 | $525 | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini saves $445 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $98.00 | $510 | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini saves $412 |
| Coding / tool-using agent 2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens) | $101 | $540 | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini saves $439 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $64.40 | $330 | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini saves $266 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $36.40 | $165 | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini saves $129 |
| Capability | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4 | What it lets you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tool / function calling | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | call your APIs and run agent loops |
| Structured output (JSON schema) | ✓ Yes | — | return JSON that validates against your schema |
| Reasoning / thinking mode | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems |
| Image input | — | ✓ Yes | read screenshots, charts and scanned pages |
| Audio input | — | — | take speech or audio directly |
| File / PDF input | — | ✓ Yes | accept documents without your own parsing step |
| Image output | — | — | generate images, not just text |
| Built-in web search | — | ✓ Yes | answer from live web results |
| Seed (reproducible sampling) | — | — | repeat a generation for tests and evals |
| Log-probabilities | — | — | read token confidence for classification and scoring |
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Neither wins outright: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini is the pick when cost matters at scale, Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4 when you need image input. In short: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini when cost matters at scale, you need structured output (JSON schema), you want the newer model; Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4 when you need image input, you need file / PDF input, you need built-in web search, you generate long outputs in one go.
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini is cheaper: $0.87 vs $6.00 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 85% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $80.50 against $525.
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini costs $0.70 per 1M input tokens and $1.40 per 1M output tokens; Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4 costs $3.00 input and $15.00 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini: 262K tokens, about 393 pages, against 200K (about 300 pages) for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.
Tool calling — AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini: yes, Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4: yes. JSON-schema structured output — AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini: yes, Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4: not advertised.
Only Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4 accepts image input; AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini is text-only for input.
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini can write up to 33K tokens (about 24,600 words) per response; Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4 up to 64K (about 48,000 words).
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini was listed on 2026-09-23; Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4 on 2025-05-22.
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