Opus 4.7 Uses More Tokens Than 4.6, Creating an Effective Price Increase
Opus 4.7 consumes ~1.46x more tokens for text than Opus 4.6 at the same per-token price, raising effective costs.
Developer Simon Willison published findings showing that Anthropic's Opus 4.7 consumes meaningfully more tokens than its predecessor for equivalent content. His updated token counter tool measured a 1.46x multiplier for raw text and up to 3x for images — though Willison notes the image difference is attributable to Opus 4.7's ability to process higher-resolution inputs, not a straightforward cost increase. For a 15MB, 30-page text-heavy PDF, the gap narrows to 1.08x: 60,934 tokens versus 56,482 on Opus 4.6. A small 682×318 pixel image showed virtually no difference — 314 tokens versus 310.
Because Opus 4.7 carries the same per-token price as Opus 4.6, teams running text-heavy workloads should account for roughly a 46% cost increase when upgrading. The practical impact varies by content type: PDFs and structured documents appear closer to the lower end of that range, while raw text and large images may hit the higher end. Willison's token counter tool is available for direct testing via his blog.