one year on
Anthropic releases Claude 3.5 Haiku at quadruple the price of its predecessor
The new small model matches or exceeds the old flagship Claude 3 Opus on many benchmarks, but developers face an unexpected price hike from $0.25 to $1 per million input tokens.
Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Haiku today, a few days later than the end-of-October target it had previously stated. Anthropic says Claude 3.5 Haiku has a similar speed to Haiku 3 and improved across every skill set, but it arrives with a price tag that has raised eyebrows: $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, four times the cost of its predecessor Claude 3 Haiku.
The company justified the increase by claiming that during final testing, Claude 3.5 Haiku surpassed Claude 3 Opus—the previous flagship model that still costs $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens—on many intelligence benchmarks. ‘As a result, we’ve increased pricing for Claude 3.5 Haiku to reflect its increase in intelligence,’ Anthropic said.
Developers took note of the unusual move. The model is text-only at launch, with no image input support, meaning Claude 3 Haiku remains the cheapest Anthropic option for vision tasks. For comparison, the budget-friendly Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B costs just $0.04 per million input tokens, and GPT-4o Mini is $0.15 per million input tokens.
Noted the price increase as 'a small surprise' and said the model does not yet support image inputs, leaving the older Claude 3 Haiku as the cheapest option for vision tasks.
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
Anthropic later added vision support to Claude 3.5 Haiku in February 2025 and reduced the price to $0.80/$4 per million tokens in December 2024.