Claude 3.5 Sonnet is frequently used for high-quality coding tasks. Cost planning should separate first-pass generation from architecture retry overhead, which is where most teams lose budget discipline.
Budget model
- Base implementation budget: 6M tokens
- Retry tax multiplier (typical): 1.8× to 2.7×
- Effective total: 10.8M to 16.2M tokens
Recommendation
Use Claude where reasoning depth matters, but reduce spend by shrinking context and regenerations through modular architecture. See the live tracker and compare with token cost studies.