Meta just charged $4 per million tokens for Muse Wonder. Five days earlier, Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 per million.
Same week. 40x price difference. Here's what Haiku 5.5 actually gives you — and where the cheap price hides real trade-offs.
What launched (Oct 7, 2026)
Claude Haiku 5.5 — Anthropic's smallest, fastest, cheapest model. Third release in the Claude 5.5 family, ahead of their planned IPO.
The headline numbers:
- $0.10 / $0.50 per million input/output tokens (prompts under 100K tokens)
- $0.50 / $2.50 for longer prompts — watch this, it matters
- 1M token context window (up from 200K on Haiku 4.5)
- 128K max output (up from 64K)
- Model ID:
claude-haiku-5-5
Anthropic says it's 75% cheaper than Haiku 4.5 and calls it the fastest, most efficient member of the family.
What's actually new (not just cheaper)
Adaptive thinking. Haiku 5.5 decides how much reasoning a task needs — on by default. First Haiku with adjustable effort controls, so you can trade intelligence against cost and latency yourself.
1M context. This is the big one for a "small" model. A million tokens of context at $0.10/1M means you can stuff entire codebases, long documents, or massive conversation histories into the cheap tier.
Built for volume. Anthropic is pitching it as the workhorse: classification, summarization, extraction, live support, voice agents, in-app assistants — plus a fast subagent model for its bigger Opus and Sonnet siblings.
The pricing trap nobody mentions
Read the rate card twice:
- Under 100K tokens: $0.10 / $0.50
- Over 100K tokens: $0.50 / $2.50 — that's 5x on input
So the "$0.10 model" is only $0.10 if you stay under 100K tokens per prompt. The moment you actually use that 1M context window — the headline feature — you're paying 5x more per input token. The cheap price and the big context are in tension by design.
This isn't dishonest, it's just how tiered pricing works. But every "Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10" headline you've seen is missing the asterisk.
Where it fits (and where it doesn't)
Use it for:
- High-volume classification, extraction, summarization
- Subagent calls inside bigger workflows (cheap reasoning steps)
- Voice agents and live support where latency matters
- Anything where you'd currently use Haiku 4.5 — it's strictly better and 75% cheaper
Don't use it for:
- Frontier reasoning — that's Opus 5.5's job at 40x the price
- Long-context work without doing the math — over 100K tokens, compare against Sonnet 5.5's halved cache-read pricing (Anthropic cut those the same day, making agentic work ~20% cheaper)
- Anything needing the strongest safeguards — note Haiku 5.5 ships with built-in blocks on a narrow set of high-risk cybersecurity requests
The real story: the market is splitting in two
Muse Wonder at $4/$20 and Haiku 5.5 at $0.10/$0.50 launched five days apart. That's not a coincidence — it's the market bifurcating:
- Premium tier ($4+/1M): frontier reasoning, memory, marathon coding — Wonder, Opus 5.5
- Volume tier ($0.10/1M): fast, cheap, good-enough — Haiku 5.5
The smart architecture isn't picking one. It's routing: Haiku 5.5 for the 90% of calls that don't need frontier intelligence, Opus/Wonder for the 10% that do. Anthropic basically told you this by pitching Haiku as a subagent model.
TL;DR
- Claude Haiku 5.5: $0.10/$0.50 per 1M (under 100K tokens), 1M context, adaptive thinking
- The $0.10 price jumps 5x past 100K tokens — do the math before stuffing context
- 75% cheaper than Haiku 4.5, available on API, Bedrock, Google Cloud, Copilot
- Real play: route volume work to Haiku, frontier work to Opus/Wonder
Sources: Anthropic announcement (Oct 7, 2026), Reuters, Claude Platform docs. Pricing from Anthropic's published rate card.
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