Claude Haiku 5.5: cheap enough to automate your business now

On October 7, 2026, Anthropic shipped Claude Haiku 5.5, the third and final model in its 5.5 family after Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 (Anthropic). It costs up to 75% less than its predecessor, and Anthropic calls it “the fastest, cheapest, and most capable small model” it has ever released. At Evicron, an AI and custom software studio based in Barcelona, we’ve been tracking this tiered lineup for two months — we covered its launch with Opus 5.5 and watched it half-complete with Sonnet 5.5 — and this release closes the loop: the missing tier, built for high, repetitive volume, is finally here. It’s the one that should matter most to any small business that ruled out AI on price alone.

What Haiku 5.5 actually brings

For prompts up to 100,000 tokens, Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 for output, against $1 and $5 for Haiku 4.5 — a 90% drop in the tier that, Anthropic says, covers 90% of the previous model’s real traffic. For longer prompts the price rises to $0.50 and $2.50, still half the old rate. Cached reads drop from $0.10 to $0.01 per million tokens. On Anthropic’s own benchmarks, Haiku 5.5 more than doubles Haiku 4.5’s performance on office-work tests (GDPval-AA v2.1) and jumps from 15.7% to 72.4% on computer-use tasks (OSWorld 2.1). It’s already available as claude-haiku-5-5 on the Claude API, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The same day, Anthropic also halved Sonnet 5.5’s cached-read price, from $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens.

The three-tier lineup, now complete

When we covered the Opus 5.5 launch in September, Anthropic promised Sonnet and Haiku were coming “in the coming weeks.” Sonnet delivered on the mid tier; Haiku now completes the budget one. The split looks like this: Opus 5.5 for complex, sustained reasoning — long contracts, decisions with real financial stakes; Sonnet 5.5 for the bulk of everyday development and knowledge work; Haiku 5.5 for the high-volume, fast, predictable work many businesses were still doing by hand because automating it with AI simply didn’t pencil out. Anthropic positions it explicitly for summarizing documents, classifying information, querying databases and live customer support, and as a cheap “subagent” working alongside Opus or Sonnet inside a single complex task.

What’s worth automating now

At Haiku 5.5’s price, several tasks that used to fail the cost-benefit test now clear it:

• First-line customer support: triaging and routing inquiries, answering repetitive questions, and escalating only what genuinely needs a person.
• Document data extraction: pulling fields from invoices, delivery notes or forms straight into your ERP or CRM instead of typing them in by hand.
• High-volume classification and summarization: incoming emails, support tickets, customer reviews or long internal reports, where what matters is speed and consistency, not deep reasoning.
• Routine database lookups: automated answers to frequent questions about stock, orders or availability, without involving your application’s more expensive model.

None of these tasks need Opus- or Sonnet-level reasoning; they need volume, speed, and a per-run cost that doesn’t spike as you scale.

How to apply it without losing quality

1. Start with what you already do by hand because of volume, not complexity. A repetitive, low-risk task that was too expensive to automate until now is the natural candidate for Haiku 5.5.
2. Measure before you move production traffic. Anthropic’s savings figure is an average; compare it against your own use cases before migrating anything live.
3. Don’t trade security for price. A cheap model handling customer or employee data still needs the same privacy and access controls as an expensive one.
4. Design to combine tiers, not pick one. The real value is Haiku filtering and classifying, so only what actually needs it reaches Sonnet or Opus.

How we handle this at Evicron

In our applied AI projects, we identify which tasks in your daily operations are candidates for this budget tier — and which ones shouldn’t touch it — before writing a line of code. If you ruled out AI before because the numbers didn’t work, our AI consulting for businesses reviews your case against today’s prices, not last year’s.

Bottom line

Haiku 5.5 completes Anthropic’s three-tier lineup and, with a price drop of up to 90% in its most-used band, turns automations that weren’t worth it before into ones that are: first-line support, data extraction, high-volume classification. The question is no longer whether AI is too expensive for your business — it’s which manual task you’ll stop doing by hand this week.

Want to know which part of your daily operations is now worth automating with the budget AI tier? Get in touch: the first consultation is free and we reply within 24 hours.