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Lesson 73 of 1455

Claude Haiku 4.5 vs. GPT-5.4 mini — the cheap-and-fast class

When you need sub-second responses at pennies per thousand calls, you are choosing from the mini tier. Here is the honest Haiku vs. mini comparison.

Builders · Model Families · ~13 min read

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The class you actually ship on

Frontier models are fun to demo. They lose money in production. The models that ship inside real customer products are the mini tier — Haiku, GPT-5.4 mini, Gemini Flash-Lite — because they are fast, cheap, and good enough for 80% of user turns.

Head to head

Compare the options

Feature	Claude Haiku 4.5	GPT-5.4 mini	Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
Input price per M	$1.00	$0.75	$0.10
Output price per M	$5.00	$4.50	$0.40
Context window	200k	400k	1M
Vision	Yes	Yes	No
Reasoning toggle	No	Yes	No
Best at	Tone and nuance in support chat	Reasoning-light tasks with vision	Sheer throughput, cheapest floor

Pick Haiku if

You run a customer-support chat where tone and de-escalation matter
You need vision (image moderation, receipt OCR with commentary)
You already use Anthropic tooling in your stack

Pick GPT-5.4 mini if

You want reasoning capability at mini prices (flip the reasoning flag on for harder turns)
You need 400k context for longer conversations
You are already on OpenAI for other products

Pick Gemini Flash-Lite if

Your cost per call is the whole game (data labeling at scale, embeddings pre-processing)
You do not need vision or nuanced tone
You are doing classification on a 1M-row dataset

Cost of a million user turns

At 1M turns, Flash-Lite costs 9% of Haiku. GPT-5.4 mini costs closer to Haiku, but buys you OpenAI tool support and reasoning controls.

python

# Assume 500 input tokens, 200 output tokens per turn # 1,000,000 turns haiku = (500 * 1_000_000 / 1_000_000) * 1.00 + (200 * 1_000_000 / 1_000_000) * 5.00 # = $500 + $1000 = $1,500 gpt_mini = (500 * 1_000_000 / 1_000_000) * 0.75 + (200 * 1_000_000 / 1_000_000) * 4.50 # = $375 + $900 = $1,275 flash_lite = (500 * 1_000_000 / 1_000_000) * 0.10 + (200 * 1_000_000 / 1_000_000) * 0.40 # = $50 + $80 = $130 print(haiku, gpt_mini, flash_lite)

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Related lessons

Claude Haiku 4.5 vs. GPT-5.4 mini — the cheap-and-fast class

The class you actually ship on

Head to head

Pick Haiku if

Pick GPT-5.4 mini if

Pick Gemini Flash-Lite if

Cost of a million user turns

Questions are best handled with a grown-up here.

Keep going

Claude Haiku 4.5 vs. GPT-5.4 mini — the cheap-and-fast class

The class you actually ship on

Head to head

Pick Haiku if

Pick GPT-5.4 mini if

Pick Gemini Flash-Lite if

Cost of a million user turns

Questions are best handled with a grown-up here.

Keep going