Haiku 5.5 Cut Prices 90%, Then the Fine Print Showed Up
Nobody uses Haiku 4.5. It shipped a year ago at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output, and GPT-6 Luna started lapping it at a tenth of the price. That line, from a Substack post the day Haiku 5.5 landed, is the whole reason this launch exists. Haiku 5.5 dropped on October 7, 2026. Anthropic cut the price by 90% for requests under 100,000 tokens, down to $0.10 in and $0.50 out.…
Haiku 5.5 slashed its price by 90% when it launched on October 7, 2026. Anthropic offered the model at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output for requests under 100,000 tokens. This price is identical to Luna's rate. However, the fine print reveals that the 90% price cut is per token, not per job, meaning additional costs can arise from factors such as the new tokenizer and higher output costs at higher token counts.
While Haiku 5.5 boasts improvements in language understanding and generation capabilities, surpassing Haiku 4.5 and Luna in certain benchmarks, the higher cost for long requests and higher-effort settings may make it a less ideal choice for certain use cases. Users who primarily require short, simple tasks may find Haiku 5.5 to be a cost-effective solution, but those relying on heavy, long-form content or complex reasoning tasks should carefully consider the additional costs before deciding to switch.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
