Lesson 81 of 1570
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.
Lesson map
What this lesson covers
Learning path
The main moves in order
- 1The forgotten tier
- 2Where Haiku shines
- 3Claude Haiku 4.5
- 4latency
Concept cluster
Terms to connect while reading
Section 1
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.
Section 2
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
End-of-lesson quiz
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