The news
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, its smallest and fastest model, on 7 October 2026. The company built it for quick, repetitive work in large volumes, such as summaries, classifying requests, database queries and live customer support. Anthropic says that on average it costs about 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5.
For requests of up to 100,000 tokens, Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, against $1 and $5 for Haiku 4.5. Longer requests cost $0.50 and $2.50. According to Anthropic, about 90% of requests to the previous Haiku were below that size. The model is available on Anthropic's own platform and through Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
On the same day, Anthropic halved the price of cache reads on Claude Sonnet 5.5 to $0.10 per million tokens, which it says makes most agent work about 20% cheaper. It also added monthly API credits to some subscriptions: $100 on Max 5x, $200 on Max 20x, and on Team plans $20 per Standard seat and $100 per Premium seat, pooled up to $500 a month. Unused credits expire at the end of each billing cycle, and they do not cover interactive use of Claude Code. Free, Pro and Enterprise plans do not get them.
Anthropic says its larger models, Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5, remain the better choice for complex coding tasks.
What it means for you
- Routine AI work, such as answering common customer questions, sorting emails or summarising documents, can now run for a fraction of the earlier cost.
- If your company pays for Claude Team, you may already have up to $500 a month to try building your own tools on the Claude API.
- The credits expire every month, so they only help if someone puts them to use.
What to do now
- If a tool of yours already calls Claude, ask your developer to test its routine tasks on Haiku 5.5 and compare cost and quality.
- Team plan owners can claim the credits in Organization settings, under Billing, once the plan has been active for seven days.
- Pick one repetitive task, such as tagging incoming support emails, and work out its monthly cost at the new prices.
How Didset can help
We build AI automations for routine work, like answering customers or sorting documents, and pick the model that does each job well at the lowest cost.
Talk to us about it
