What's New in Claude · Released 7 October 2026
High-volume work just got cheap enough to try again.
Claude Haiku 5.5 is Anthropic’s new small model, released on 7 October 2026. It is built for work that runs thousands of times a day: summaries, classification, extraction, routing. Anthropic says it costs about 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5, and it is the first Haiku with an effort setting, so you choose between cost and quality per task.
Two changes shipped beside it. Cache reads on Claude Sonnet 5.5 were cut in half, which Anthropic puts at about 20% cheaper on most agentic work. And Claude Max and Team plans now include monthly API credits for building your own tools. For a company, the practical question is which piece of repetitive work you shelved because the cost did not add up.
What changed
claude haiku 5.5 price and features
Three changes on one day.
Anthropic’s own figures, each linked in the sources at the end of this page.
- Claude Haiku 5.5
- From $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, with a 1M token context window and 128k output tokens. Anthropic describes it as its cheapest, fastest and most capable small model, and says it runs about 75% cheaper than Haiku 4.5 on average.
- An effort setting on a small model
- Haiku 5.5 is the first Haiku-class model with adjustable effort. Low effort keeps the cost down on simple jobs; higher effort buys more reasoning where a task needs it.
- Sonnet 5.5 cache reads halved
- From $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens. Cache writes and every other price are unchanged.
- API credits on Max and Team plans
- Max and Team subscribers can claim a monthly credit for the Claude API. On Team plans the seats are pooled into one balance, capped at $500 a month. Free, Pro and Enterprise plans are not eligible, and the credit does not cover interactive Claude Code sessions.
What it means
how will claude haiku 5.5 affect my business
What it means for your company.
Most firms we work with have a list of tasks that are dull, frequent and only half done: tagging inbound email, sorting documents in a data room, pulling the same five fields out of every monthly report. Those are exactly the jobs a small model is for, and the price is what usually stopped them.
- Leadership
- Re-open the business cases that died on cost. A workflow that ran the numbers on Haiku 4.5 now costs roughly a quarter as much, before you touch the design.
- Operations
- Haiku 5.5 fits the first pass on high-volume reading: classify, extract, route, and hand anything that needs judgment to a person or to a larger model. It is the wrong choice for a covenant analysis or an IC memo; that is Opus 5.5’s work.
- IT and engineering
- Code written for Haiku 4.5 can break. Manual extended thinking, the temperature, top_p and top_k sampling parameters, and assistant message prefill can each return a 400 error on Haiku 5.5. Test before you switch a production workload.
- Team plan owners
- The monthly API credit is a free budget for a pilot: an internal tool, an agent, a prototype your engineer has been asking to build. The credit goes to one linked Console organization, and you cannot change it yourself afterwards, so pick the one you will build in.
This week
What to do this week.
Three things, in this order.
- List the shelved tasks
- Ask each team lead for the repetitive reading their people still do by hand. Anything that runs more than a few hundred times a month is a candidate for Haiku 5.5.
- Claim the credit, carefully
- On a Team or Max plan, claim the API credit in a web browser on claude.ai, and link the Console organization you intend to build in. The offer appears once the plan has been active for seven days.
- Test before you migrate
- If anything in production runs on Haiku 4.5, run it on Haiku 5.5 against your own examples first, with the migration guide open beside you.
Sources
Where every figure on this page comes from.
Facts, prices and dates are Anthropic’s own, from the pages below. What it means and what to do are our view, from the firms we work with. Written by By The People Technologies and reviewed by Fatjon (Tony) Kalemaj, COO and Head of Applied AI, before it was published on 13 October 2026.
- Anthropic: Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5
- www.anthropic.com
- Claude Platform release notes, 7 October 2026
- platform.claude.com
- Claude models overview and pricing
- platform.claude.com
- Claude Help Center: API credits for Max and Team plans
- support.claude.com
Questions
The short answers.
The questions people ask about this release, answered in full.
How much does Claude Haiku 5.5 cost?
From $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens on the Claude API, according to Anthropic’s model overview. Anthropic says it runs about 75% cheaper than Claude Haiku 4.5 on average.
Is Claude Haiku 5.5 good enough for business documents?
For high-volume, well-defined work such as summaries, classification and extraction, Anthropic positions it as the right model. For work that needs sustained judgment, like reading a credit agreement or drafting an investment memo, use Claude Opus 5.5 or Sonnet 5.5. Test it on your own documents before deciding.
Do Claude Team plans include API credits?
Yes, since 7 October 2026. Team plans pool the credit across seats into one monthly balance, capped at $500. Max plans also qualify. Free, Pro and Enterprise plans do not.
Will my code for Claude Haiku 4.5 work on Haiku 5.5?
Not always. Manual extended thinking, the temperature, top_p and top_k parameters, and assistant message prefill can each return a 400 error on Haiku 5.5. Anthropic publishes a migration guide for each change.
Want this working inside your firm?
We run Claude workshops on your own documents and stay on as your teams adopt each release. Write to us and say what you are trying to get done.
Subject line: Claude: Claude Haiku 5.5, cheaper Sonnet 5.5, and API credits on Team plans