How Much Cheaper Is Haiku 5.5 Than Sonnet 5.5, and What Is It Good For

Haiku 5.5 handles small jobs fast, with API pricing for input and output running about 1/20 of Sonnet 5.5 once a prompt reaches up to 100,000 tokens. The real win is that you can lean on AI for everyday work far more often while spending a lot less.

How much cheaper than Sonnet 5.5?

Prices below are in USD per million tokens. A token is the unit AI models use to measure how much content they process.

At the same token count, Haiku's input and output costs are 95% lower.

Example: a batch of work uses a total of 1 million input tokens and 1 million output tokens. If every Haiku request reaches 100K tokens, with no prompt caching and before any tool fees:

• Sonnet 5.5: $12.
• Haiku 5.5: $0.60.

This is a same-token comparison, not a promise that every real bill drops by 95%. Official pricing.

What is Haiku 5.5 actually good at?

Haiku fits work that needs fast answers, runs many times, and has clear instructions. According to Anthropic, the model is built for summarizing, classifying, lookups, and supporting larger models. Source: Anthropic.

Things worth trying right away:

• Summarizing documents or meeting notes into a few key points.
• Classifying customer messages: pricing questions, support, complaints.
• Extracting data like names, dates, and amounts into a table.
• Supporting bigger builds: finding files, checking docs, doing a small piece of work, then having it verified.

In Tuanisme's video, the creator describes a crew of Haiku models building each scene individually while the main model reviews and stitches them together. The simple way to picture it: Sonnet is the team lead, Haiku handles each assigned piece.

Haiku or Sonnet, which one?

Use Haiku for small, repetitive work that is easy to check. Keep Sonnet for feature design, tricky bug fixes, or anything that needs close oversight from start to finish. Read more on how to choose a Claude model and Claude AI for beginners.

Quick note: once a Haiku prompt passes 100K tokens, pricing becomes $0.50 for input and $2.50 for output per million tokens, still about 1/4 of Sonnet 5.5. These are API prices used inside apps and automations, not the Claude subscription fee. Output still needs checking, especially when the model has to retry several times.

If you are currently using Sonnet for everything, move the summarizing, classifying, and data extraction work to Haiku first. That is the easiest way to capture the savings.