Claude Haiku 4.5 Delivers 90% of Sonnet Performance at $1/$5 Pricing

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5 on October 15, 2025, and the value proposition is hard to argue with: 73.3% on SWE-bench Verified, roughly 90% of Sonnet 4.5's coding performance, at $1/$5 per million tokens — the lowest pricing in Anthropic's lineup, according to Anthropic.

Speed and Cost

Haiku 4.5 runs 4-5x faster than Sonnet 4.5. For high-volume, latency-sensitive applications — chatbots, real-time coding assistants, classification tasks — speed matters more than marginal benchmark improvements.

At $1/$5 per million tokens, it's 3x cheaper than Sonnet. For companies processing millions of API calls daily, the cost difference compounds fast. The 200K context window and 64K max output match the larger models.

Surprising Computer Use Performance

In a twist, Haiku 4.5 actually surpasses Sonnet 4 on certain computer use tasks. Anthropic describes its performance as comparable to Sonnet 4's on agentic coding, which is remarkable for a model designed primarily for speed and efficiency.

This makes Haiku 4.5 a serious option for automated workflows where you need "good enough" intelligence at scale rather than maximum capability on individual tasks.

Where It Fits

The Claude lineup after Haiku 4.5:

• Opus 4.5 ($5/$25): Maximum capability, long-horizon agent work
• Sonnet 4.5 ($3/$15): Best value for production coding
• Haiku 4.5 ($1/$5): High-volume, speed-first workloads

For comparison, GPT-5 mini occupies a similar niche in OpenAI's lineup, and Gemini Flash models compete directly on the speed/cost axis.

Our Take

Haiku 4.5 is the model nobody talks about but everybody uses. At $1/$5, it's cheap enough to run on everything — and at 73.3% SWE-bench, it's good enough for most tasks that don't require frontier-level reasoning. If you're building a production application and not sure which model to start with, Haiku 4.5 is the answer until you hit a task it can't handle.

FAQ

How much does Claude Haiku 4.5 cost? Haiku 4.5 costs $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, making it Anthropic's most affordable model. The model ID is claude-haiku-4-5-20251001.

Is Haiku 4.5 good enough for coding tasks? Yes — Haiku 4.5 scores 73.3% on SWE-bench Verified, which is approximately 90% of Sonnet 4.5's performance. For routine coding tasks, code review, and refactoring, it's more than capable.

How fast is Haiku 4.5 compared to Sonnet? Haiku 4.5 runs 4-5x faster than Sonnet 4.5, making it the best choice for applications where response latency matters, such as real-time chat, code completion, and high-volume API calls.