Claude Haiku 5.5: Up to 90% cheaper AI, and what it means for your marketing
Anthropic has launched its cheapest and fastest small model
On 7 October 2026, Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5. According to Anthropic, it is the cheapest, fastest and most capable small model they have ever released, built for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks such as summaries, classification, database queries and customer service.
The most striking part is the price. For prompts up to 100,000 tokens, Haiku 5.5 is 90% cheaper than its predecessor, Haiku 4.5.
Claude Haiku 5.5, October 2026
90%
lower price than Claude Haiku 4.5 for prompts up to 100,000 tokens.
Source: AnthropicPricing in detail
The price depends on prompt size. Under 100,000 tokens the model is extremely cheap. Above the threshold the price rises, but it is still 50% cheaper than Haiku 4.5.
| Per 1M tokens | Haiku 5.5 (up to 100k) | Haiku 5.5 (over 100k) | Haiku 4.5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.10 | $0.50 | $1.00 |
| Output | $0.50 | $2.50 | $5.00 |
| Cache reads | $0.01 | $0.05 | $0.10 |
| Cache writes | $0.125 | $0.625 | $1.25 |
Anthropic estimates that the model costs around 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5 on average. The figure accounts for the new tokenizer using slightly more tokens per task.
Cheaper, but also much better
Haiku 5.5 is not just cheaper. According to Anthropic's own tests, it is also a big step up in quality. On OSWorld, which measures the ability to complete tasks on a computer, it scores 72.4% against 15.7% for Haiku 4.5. It is also the first Haiku model with an adjustable effort setting, so you can choose the balance between speed and thoroughness.
The model is available through Anthropic's API as well as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
What does it mean for your marketing?
When the price of AI drops this much, it becomes profitable to automate tasks that used to be too expensive to run at scale.
Product data and feeds
Enrich, translate and categorise thousands of products in your feed, so Google, Meta and AI search better understand your range.
Classification and analysis
Automatically review search terms, reviews and customer enquiries and find patterns you can use directly in optimisation.
Customer service and content
Fast, cheap models make it realistic to answer customers live and produce copy at scale without the bill running away.
At Searchmind, we have already put Haiku 5.5 to work in our own AI tools.
Source: Anthropic, Claude Haiku 5.5, 7 October 2026.
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