AI BriefingClaude Haiku 5.5 Pricing Analysis: 75% Cost Reduction and Tokenizer Impact
·2026.10.21 04:41
Key point
New pricing and tokenizer changes make Haiku 5.5 cheaper per token but require more tokens per task, with savings dependent on prompt length and effort settings.
Details
- Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on Oct 7, claiming it costs around 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5.
- List prices drop significantly: input costs $0.10 per million tokens (up to 100k) versus $1.00 for Haiku 4.5, and output costs $0.50 per million tokens (up to 100k) versus $5.00.
- The new tokenizer produces approximately 30% more tokens for the same input text compared to Haiku 4.5, partially offsetting the per-token price reduction.
- Adaptive thinking is enabled by default, keeping all previous thinking blocks in context as input tokens, which increases token counts in multi-turn conversations.
- Minimum cacheable prompt size drops from 4,096 to 512 tokens, and a new adjustable effort setting allows users to balance cost and output length; moving from low to medium effort roughly halved early stopping and more than doubled output tokens per attempt in Anthropic's testing.
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