Lesson 81 of 1455
Claude Haiku 4.5 — speed/cost analysis
Haiku is Anthropic's cheap, fast tier. Here is the math on when it beats Sonnet for production workloads.
Builders · Model Families · ~15 min read
The forgotten tier
Everyone talks about Opus and Sonnet. Haiku 4.5 is the quiet workhorse — approximately $1 in / $5 out per million tokens, sub-second first-token latency, and quality that now rivals what Sonnet 3.5 shipped 18 months ago. For high-volume apps, Haiku is where the margins live.
Where Haiku shines
- Classification and routing (which agent handles this ticket?)
- Structured extraction from semi-clean docs
- Tool-call decisions in multi-step agents
- Autocomplete-style suggestions under 200ms
Compare the options
| Metric | Haiku 4.5 | Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Input / M tokens | ~$1 | $3 |
| Output / M tokens | ~$5 | $15 |
| Typical p50 latency | <1s | 2-4s |
| Best for | routing, extraction, high QPS | reasoning, long docs, quality chat |
A routing call that costs a fraction of a cent.
client.messages.create( model="claude-haiku-4-5", max_tokens=200, messages=[{"role": "user", "content": f"Classify: {ticket}"}], )Key terms in this lesson
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