Question

A developer is building a feature that sends high-resolution product photos to Claude for description generation. They notice their per-request costs are higher than expected and suspect the images are contributing significantly. At a conceptual level, what best explains how image inputs affect cost in the Messages API?

Accepted Answer

Images are converted into tokens based on their dimensions, so larger, higher-resolution images consume more tokens and cost more.

Answer

Images are billed at a flat rate per image regardless of size, so resolution has no effect on cost.

Answer

Image inputs are always free; only the generated text description is counted toward token usage.

Answer

Images consume tokens only when temperature is set above 0, so lowering temperature eliminates their cost.