Anthropic Releases Claude Haiku 5.5 with Tiered Context Pricing and API Credits
Anthropic has released Claude Haiku 5.5, featuring updated model performance along with tiered pricing based on context window size. Additionally, Anthropic introduced monthly API credits for Max and Team plan subscribers, ranging from $100 to $500 per month. Providing bundled monthly API credits enables developers to build and deploy AI-enhanced features directly without immediate additional API bills. However, introducing a 5x price hike for contexts exceeding 100,000 tokens could significantly increase costs for long-context agentic workflows. Under Haiku 5.5's new pricing tier, prompts up to 100k tokens cost $0.10 input and $0.50 output per million tokens, but prompts over 100k tokens jump to $0.50 input and $2.50 output per million tokens. Early community benchmarks indicate high throughput around 131 tokens per second, though complex visual tasks like image-to-HTML code generation remain limited compared to larger models like Opus.
## BACKGROUND
Large language models process input and output in token units, and their context window limits the total amount of text the model can process in a single request. Haiku represents Anthropic's lightweight, high-speed model tier tailored for low latency and cost efficiency compared to full-sized models.