# Claude Haiku 4.5: pricing, crowd verdict, pros and cons (2026)

> Anthropic's fastest model: about 90% of Sonnet 4.5's coding skill at $1/$5 per 1M tokens, 200K context.

Source: [GLAD-AI-TOR](https://glad-ia-tor.com) · Full page: https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-haiku-4-5
Arena: llm-models · Crowd score: 67% recommend (2 votes, Bayesian-smoothed) · Price: $5/1M out

Small, speed-focused Claude model released October 15, 2025. Scores 73.3% on SWE-bench Verified, roughly 90% of Sonnet 4.5's agentic coding performance at one third of the cost. Supports vision input and extended thinking, with a 200K context window and 64K max output.

## Key facts

- provider: Anthropic
- contextWindow: 200K tokens
- priceIn: $1/1M in
- priceOut: $5/1M out
- modalities: text, vision (input); text output
- openWeights: no

## Ratings (editorial, 1-5)

- reasoning: 3/5
- coding: 3.5/5
- writing: 3/5
- speed: 4.5/5
- valueForMoney: 4/5

## Pros

- 73.3% on SWE-bench Verified, about 90% of Sonnet 4.5's agentic coding at one third of the price
- Fast: more than 2x Sonnet 4 speed per Anthropic, with launch customers reporting 4-5x faster than Sonnet 4.5; ~92-110 output tok/s measured by Artificial Analysis
- Devs report precise, localized code edits that avoid touching irrelevant code, better than GPT-5 mini class in early testing
- Supports both vision input and extended thinking, rare at this price tier at launch
- Well suited as worker model in multi-agent setups (Sonnet/Opus plans, parallel Haiku sub-agents execute)
- Prompt caching reads at $0.10/1M and 50% Batch API discount cut effective cost further

## Cons

- $5/1M output is pricey for a small model: Gemini Flash and GPT mini tiers undercut it several-fold on output-heavy tasks
- 200K context (vs 1M for Sonnet 5/Opus siblings) and 64K max output limit large-codebase and long-output work
- Mediocre cross-domain reasoning: users report weak results on GPQA, MedQA, MMMU style knowledge tasks
- Throughput varies widely in practice (82-208 tok/s reported) and quality degrades on long 7-8+ minute agentic sessions
- Knowledge cutoff (reliable to Feb 2025) is dated by mid-2026 standards

## Best for

- high-volume, latency-sensitive API workloads
- sub-agent orchestration and agentic tool use
- scoped coding edits and code review
- real-time chat assistants

## Verdict

Pick Haiku 4.5 if you are on the Anthropic stack and need near-Sonnet coding quality at low latency and a third of the price: it is a massive step up from Haiku 3.5 and excels as the worker model in multi-agent pipelines. It remains Anthropic's current small model as of July 2026, so it is the default cheap tier for Claude-based products. Avoid it for deep cross-domain reasoning, very large codebases (200K context cap), or pure cost-per-token shopping, where Gemini Flash and GPT mini tiers are now cheaper, and step up to Sonnet 5 when quality matters more than speed.

## Pricing note

Single tier: $1/1M input, $5/1M output; prompt cache reads $0.10/1M (5m writes $1.25/1M) and Batch API cuts 50% ($0.50/$2.50); no long-context surcharge (200K max).

## Alternatives and head-to-heads

- [Claude Fable 5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-fable-5) (crowd score 63%) · [Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Claude Fable 5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/claude-haiku-4-5-vs-claude-fable-5)
- [Claude Opus 4.7](https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-opus-4-7) (crowd score 57%) · [Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Claude Opus 4.7](https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/claude-haiku-4-5-vs-claude-opus-4-7)
- [Claude Sonnet 5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-sonnet-5) (crowd score 57%) · [Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/claude-haiku-4-5-vs-claude-sonnet-5)
- [Gemini 3 Pro](https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/gemini-3-pro) (crowd score 57%) · [Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Gemini 3 Pro](https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/claude-haiku-4-5-vs-gemini-3-pro)

Full ranking: https://glad-ia-tor.com/hall-of-fame/llm-models

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