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)
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5
Tencent: Hy4 preview
Difference
Customer-support chatbot
50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens)
$350
$113
Tencent: Hy4 preview saves $237
RAG search over documents
20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens)
$340
$125
Tencent: Hy4 preview saves $215
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)
$360
$130
Tencent: Hy4 preview saves $230
Batch summarisation
10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens)
$220
$81.73
Tencent: Hy4 preview saves $138
Long-document analysis
500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens)
$110
$44.20
Tencent: Hy4 preview saves $65.80
Capabilities side by side
Capability
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5
Tencent: Hy4 preview
What it lets you do
Tool / function calling
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
call your APIs and run agent loops
Structured output (JSON schema)
✓ Yes
✓ 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)
—
✓ Yes
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.
Price history
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-09-29.
Tencent: Hy4 preview: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-08-29.
Which should you choose?
Choose Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5 if…
you need image input — to read screenshots, charts and scanned pages; Tencent: Hy4 preview does not advertise it
you need file / PDF input — to accept documents without your own parsing step; Tencent: Hy4 preview does not advertise it
you need built-in web search — to answer from live web results; Tencent: Hy4 preview does not advertise it
you generate long outputs in one go — up to 128K tokens (about 96,000 words) per response
Choose Tencent: Hy4 preview if…
cost matters at scale — it is 69% cheaper on a typical 3:1 input/output mix ($113 vs $350 a month for 50,000 support chats)
you need seed (reproducible sampling) — to repeat a generation for tests and evals; Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5 does not advertise it
Frequently asked questions
Is Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5 better than Tencent: Hy4 preview?
Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5 is the pick when you need image input, Tencent: Hy4 preview when cost matters at scale. In short: Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5 when you need image input, you need file / PDF input, you need built-in web search, you generate long outputs in one go; Tencent: Hy4 preview when cost matters at scale, you need seed (reproducible sampling).
Which is cheaper, Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5 or Tencent: Hy4 preview?
Tencent: Hy4 preview is cheaper: $1.25 vs $4.00 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 69% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $113 against $350.
How much do Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Tencent: Hy4 preview cost per million tokens?
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs $2.00 per 1M input tokens and $10.00 per 1M output tokens; Tencent: Hy4 preview costs $0.83 input and $2.50 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Which has the bigger context window, Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5 or Tencent: Hy4 preview?
Tencent: Hy4 preview: 1.0M tokens, about 1,573 pages, against 1M (about 1,500 pages) for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5.
Do Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Tencent: Hy4 preview support function calling and JSON output?
Claude Sonnet 5.5 is Anthropic's Sonnet-class model for well-scoped everyday work, succeeding Claude Sonnet 5 as a direct upgrade. It is especially strong at building features, fixing bugs, and producing...
Tencent: Hy4 preview is a mixture-of-experts model from Tencent, with 49B active parameters out of 770B total. It is designed for coding agents, complex tool-use workflows, and productivity tasks that...