Is Claude Haiku 5.5 really 10x cheaper than Claude Haiku 4.5?

Yes. Haiku 5.5 is priced at $0.1 per million input tokens and $0.5 per million output tokens, compared to Haiku 4.5's $1 and $5 respectively. That's an exact 10x reduction on both input and output pricing, not just a partial discount.

Why would anyone still use Claude Haiku 4.5 if Haiku 5.5 is cheaper?

Haiku 4.5 may still suit teams with existing integrations, specific benchmarked behavior, or workloads already tuned and tested against it. Some teams delay migrating to a newer model until they've validated output quality and consistency for their specific use case.

Does the context window differ between Haiku 5.5 and Haiku 4.5?

Haiku 4.5 has a confirmed 200K token context window. Haiku 5.5's exact context window wasn't clearly published in available sources, so it should be treated as unconfirmed until verified directly against Anthropic's official documentation.

What's a realistic monthly cost difference at high volume?

At 100M input and 30M output tokens per month, Haiku 5.5 costs $25 while Haiku 4.5 costs $250 — a $225 monthly difference. For output-heavy or high-volume applications, that gap scales linearly and becomes significant quickly.

HEAD-TO-HEAD · BUDGET-TIER · VERIFIED OCTOBER 11, 2026

Claude Haiku 5.5 vs Claude Haiku 4.5: which one is actually cheaper?

Claude Haiku 5.5 and Claude Haiku 4.5 sit at opposite ends of Anthropic's budget tier. Haiku 5.5 launched at a tenth of its predecessor's price, while Haiku 4.5 remains Anthropic's prior-generation value pick at $1/$5 per million tokens.

Spec	Claude Haiku 5.5	Claude Haiku 4.5
Input / 1M tokens	$0.10	$1.00
Output / 1M tokens	$0.50	$5.00
Context window	200K (unconfirmed, likely matches Haiku lineage)	200K

The output price gap

The gap is identical on both sides of the ledger: Haiku 5.5 charges $0.1 per million input tokens versus Haiku 4.5's $1, and $0.5 per million output tokens versus Haiku 4.5's $5 — a flat 10x reduction on input and a 10x reduction on output alike, so the pricing ratio doesn't shift based on whether your workload is prompt-heavy or generation-heavy.

Context window

Claude Haiku 4.5 ships with a confirmed 200K token context window, matching the rest of Anthropic's current Haiku/Sonnet generation. Claude Haiku 5.5's context window was not clearly published in available sources at the time of writing; it's reasonable to expect Anthropic kept it at 200K or expanded it, but this should be treated as an estimate rather than a confirmed spec until Anthropic's docs are checked directly.

Worked example

At 100M input tokens and 30M output tokens per month: Haiku 5.5 costs (100 × $0.1) + (30 × $0.5) = $10 + $15 = $25/month. Haiku 4.5 costs (100 × $1) + (30 × $5) = $100 + $150 = $250/month. That's a $225/month difference, with Haiku 5.5 costing exactly 10x less than Haiku 4.5 at this volume.

Prices from the LLM Price Watch daily tracker, 2026-10-11. Prices change; use the calculator with your own usage for an exact comparison, or see the full price table for every tracked model.