TipClaude Haiku 5.5: Anthropic's smallest model gets better and much cheaper
Anthropic has released Claude Haiku 5.5, a fast and cheap model for businesses building their own AI workflows. On average it costs about 75% less to run than its predecessor Haiku 4.5.
On 7 October 2026 Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5, its smallest and fastest model. It is made for large volumes of simpler tasks, such as sorting emails, summarising tickets, classifying requests or running a customer service bot. It is also the first Haiku model with an adjustable effort setting, so you can choose between lower cost and better answers.
The API price is $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, as long as the text you send in is no more than 100,000 tokens. Above that limit the price is $0.50 and $2.50. The previous Haiku 4.5 cost $1 and $5. According to Anthropic, about 90% of requests fall under the limit.
At the same time Anthropic halved the price of so-called cache reads in Claude Sonnet 5.5, to $0.10 per million tokens. According to the company this makes Sonnet 5.5 around 20% cheaper for most agent work. Max and Team subscribers also get a monthly API credit: $100 for Max 5x, $200 for Max 20x and up to $500 for Team, pooled across users.
If you only use the Claude app, nothing changes in your price. The news mainly matters to small businesses that connect AI to their own tools, for example through Zapier or Make, and want to keep the cost per task down.
How to get started
- Building an automated workflow? Try Haiku 5.5 first. It is often enough for simple, repetitive tasks.
- If you have Max or Team: claim the credit under Settings > Billing (Max) or Organization settings > Billing (Team) by linking a Claude Console organisation.
- Always set a spending limit in the API account before testing.
- Not sure what AI costs you? Use the "Which AI plan do we need?" prompt in the Prompt Workshop.
More on TipAI
Sources
- Anthropic: Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5 (7 okt 2026) (retrieved 2026-10-20)
- Claude Help Center: Release notes (7 okt 2026) (retrieved 2026-10-20)
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