# Claude Haiku 5.5 released with 1/10th price and 1M token context

Digest AI · Marketing & Small Business · published 2026-10-24T00:05:00Z

Canonical: https://digestai.news/story/claude-haiku-5-5-released-with-1-10th-price-and-1m-token-context

## Summary

Claude released its new lightest model, Claude Haiku 5.5, on October 7th. The model is priced at 1/10th the cost of the previous Haiku 4.5, with input costs dropping to 5 cents per 1 million tokens for texts under 100,000 tokens. The model now supports a 1 million token context window, up from 200,000, and offers five levels of reasoning depth.

The author tested the model by generating 30 follow-up emails, which cost 0.44 yen in total. While Haiku 5.5 correctly identified a date error in the prompt, it also invented plausible but false details about student behavior. In a comparison for a diagnostic tool, Haiku 5.5 was faster but used fictional placeholders like "Company A," whereas Sonnet 5.5 used clear brackets like "[Name]." The author decided to use Haiku for high-volume internal drafts and Sonnet for text sent directly to recipients to avoid errors.

The model is available on all Claude.ai plans, including the free tier, and in Claude Code. The author advises choosing models based on who will read the output: Haiku for cheap, high-volume tasks that require human review, Sonnet for client-facing text, and Opus for complex strategic thinking.

## Key points

- Claude Haiku 5.5 costs 5 cents per 1 million input tokens for texts under 100,000 tokens.
- The model supports a 1 million token context window and five reasoning depth levels.
- Testing showed Haiku 5.5 invented fictional details in emails, while Sonnet 5.5 used clear placeholders.

## Why it matters

The significant price drop and increased context window make high-volume AI tasks affordable for individuals and small businesses, though users must verify outputs to prevent hallucinated details in client-facing content.

## Sources

1. [I asked the cheapest Claude to write thank-you emails for 30 people, and it cost 0.44 yen](https://note.com/akira_aicschool/n/ne30f540c1a1e?hl=en) (note.com, 2026-10-24)

Part of the developing story: [AI Coding Wars Models Costs and Side Hustles](https://digestai.news/thread/anthropic-releases-free-crash-course-on-building-ai-agents-with-opus-5-5) (5 stories)

## Cite

Digest AI, "Claude Haiku 5.5 released with 1/10th price and 1M token context", 24 October 2026, https://digestai.news/story/claude-haiku-5-5-released-with-1-10th-price-and-1m-token-context

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