Claude Haiku 5.5 Pricing: The 100K-Token Rule for Agents
Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens up to 100K tokens of prompt, and $0.50 per million above it, a fivefold cliff that decides your agent bill. Anthropic released the model on 7 October 2026 on its own platform, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure the same day. Output is $0.50 per million tokens at or below the threshold and $2.50 above it. The context window is 1M tokens with…
Claude Haiku 5.5 pricing introduces a 100K-token cliff, significantly increasing costs for agents handling prompts above that threshold. The model, launched on 7 October 2026, is the most affordable option available, costing $0.10 per million input tokens up to 100K tokens, and $0.50 per million above it. Output costs are $0.50 per million for prompts at or below the limit, and $2.50 above it.
The context window is 1M tokens, with 128K tokens available for output. For a high-volume agent loop with 8,000 input tokens and 500 output tokens per call, using Haiku 5.5 without caching would cost $1,050 per million calls. However, implementing prompt caching can reduce this to around $520 per million calls. The risk lies in exceeding the 100K token limit, which can happen quickly if context is not managed properly.
Key factors to consider include: counting tokens before sending requests to ensure they stay below 90,000 tokens, truncating tool output at the boundary, and routing large jobs to models built for long inputs. The Agent Run Cost Simulator can help model multi-step runs to identify potential costs. While the cheap tier offers savings, it does not eliminate all costs, such as retries and tool output, which can significantly impact overall expenses.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
