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Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Claude Haiku 5.5: API Cost Comparison

Which Claude to put on the hot path. Many teams route easy requests to Haiku and the rest to Sonnet.

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Updated 7 Nov 2026

Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Haiku 5.5 pricing side by side
Side by side	Claude Sonnet 5.5 Anthropic	Claude Haiku 5.5 Anthropic
Input / 1M	$2	$0.10
Output / 1M	$10	$0.50
Cached input / 1M	$0.10	$0.01
Batch discount	50% off	50% off
Context window	1M tokens	1M tokens
Long-prompt surcharge	None	Above 100K input
Tier	Mid-tier	Small / fast

Workload

Requests per day

Avg input tokens

tok

Avg output tokens

tok

Cached input

Repeated system prompt or docs

Batched requests

Jobs that can wait hours

Models

Anthropic

OpenAI

Google

Mistral

DeepSeek

$ per 1M tokens, input / output

Monthly cost · 30 days

Cheapest: $105; Claude Haiku 5.5
Priciest: $2,100; Claude Sonnet 5.5
Spread: 20.0×; priciest vs cheapest

	Per request		Per 1K users / mo
Claude Haiku 5.5Cheapest	$0.00035	$105	$52.50
Claude Sonnet 5.5	$0.00700	$2,100	$1,050

Per 1K users assumesrequests per user per day.

Where the money is

If 60% of your traffic is simple enough for Claude Haiku 5.5, routing it there instead of Claude Sonnet 5.5 saves about $1,197/month.

Caching half your input on Claude Sonnet 5.5 (a shared system prompt or document) would cut about $570/month.

You're looking at $105–$2,100/month.

Most AI products I audit can cut that 30–60% with routing, caching and shorter prompts.

Get a cost-cutting audit

Cost at three traffic levels

Same request on both: 2,000 input tokens and 300 output tokens, no caching, no batch, 30-day month.

Monthly cost of Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Claude Haiku 5.5
Requests / day	Claude Sonnet 5.5	Claude Haiku 5.5	Difference
1,000	$210	$10.50	$200
10,000	$2,100	$105	$1,995
100,000	$21,000	$1,050	$19,950

By request type:

Cost per 1,000 calls by request type, Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Claude Haiku 5.5
Per 1K calls	Claude Sonnet 5.5	Claude Haiku 5.5
Classification or routing call	$0.9000	$0.0450
Support chat reply	$5.50	$0.2750
RAG answer over your docs	$16.00	$0.8000
Long document summary	$90.00	$4.50

When to pick which

Claude Haiku 5.5 is 20.0× cheaper on input tokens, which matters most for RAG and long prompts.
Claude Haiku 5.5 is 20.0× cheaper on output tokens, which matters most for long answers, code generation and reasoning.
Cache reads are 10.0× cheaper on Claude Haiku 5.5 ($0.01 vs $0.10 per 1M), so it pulls ahead when your prompts share a long fixed prefix.
Both offer 50% off for batch processing.
Claude Haiku 5.5 bills the whole request at a higher rate once input passes 100,000 tokens.

Claude Sonnet 5.5: The default for production chat, RAG and coding assistants: strong quality at a mid-tier price.

Claude Haiku 5.5: High-volume classification, routing, extraction and short replies where cost per call matters most.

Verdict

Claude Haiku 5.5 wins on price

20.0× cheaper

On price alone, Claude Haiku 5.5 wins: about 20.0× cheaper than Claude Sonnet 5.5 for a typical request. Price is one input. Run both on 50 of your real prompts, compare the answers and the billed tokens, and route by difficulty if the quality gap only shows up on hard requests.

How the math works

Every provider bills input tokens (your prompt, system prompt and retrieved documents) and output tokens (the reply) separately, per million. Output is usually 4–5× the input price, so chatty apps are output-heavy and RAG apps are input-heavy.

cost per request = (fresh_in × input_price

+ cached_in × cached_price

+ out × output_price) / 1,000,000

× (1 − batched_share × batch_discount)

monthly = cost per request × requests per day × 30

Two adjustments are applied automatically. Introductory prices (currently on some Gemini models) are used until their end date. Long-prompt surcharges kick in when your average input crosses the provider's threshold: 272K tokens on current OpenAI models, 100K on Claude Haiku 5.5.

Not modelled: cache-write premiums, priority or fast tiers, regional surcharges, image and audio tokens, and reasoning tokens a model spends before answering (they bill as output, so add them to your output estimate if you use extended thinking).

Questions

Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 5.5 or Claude Haiku 5.5?

For a typical request of 2,000 input and 300 output tokens, Claude Haiku 5.5 is about 20.0× cheaper: $0.00700 per call on Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs $0.00035 on Claude Haiku 5.5. At 10,000 requests a day that is $2,100 vs $105 a month.

Can I use both Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Haiku 5.5?

Yes, and many teams do. Put a thin routing layer in front of both: send the requests that need the stronger or larger-context model to it, and everything else to the cheaper one. Keep prompts provider-neutral so you can move traffic when prices change.

How often do Anthropic change prices?

Often enough that a comparison older than a few months is suspect. The prices on this page were verified on 7 Nov 2026 from each provider's own documentation, linked in the Sources section.

Sources

All prices are list prices from each provider's own documentation, standard tier, in USD, last verified on 7 Nov 2026. Providers change prices often; if a number here disagrees with the source, the source wins.

Claude Sonnet 5.5platform.claude.com
Claude Haiku 5.5platform.claude.com

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