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Claude 3.5 Haiku

Last updated 2026-07-17 · Reviewed by ToolForge Editorial

Anthropic's fastest, cheapest model — near-Sonnet quality at lightning speed.

★ 4.6/5 · Millions · Since 2024 · Free tier

$0.80/M tok input

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Cheap speed, real quality

Claude 3.5 Haiku is Anthropic's smallest, fastest model — and unusually, it punches close to much larger models on many tasks. It's the go-to for classification, extraction, chat routing, and any workload where latency and cost dominate but you still want Claude's instruction-following.

Who it's for: Teams needing fast, affordable, high-volume text processing with Claude's reliability.

Key features

⚡ Blazing speed

Lowest-latency Claude for real-time apps.

💸 Low cost

Fraction of Opus/Sonnet price per token.

🎯 Strong instruction-following

Better than expected for its size.

📚 Long context

200K window for big inputs.

The honest take

✓ What works

Near-Sonnet quality, far cheaper
Very low latency
Great for routing/classification
200K context

✗ What doesn't

Not for hardest reasoning
Weaker than Opus on nuance
Closed API (no self-host)
No vision in base form

Verdict

Claude 3.5 Haiku is the smart default for high-volume, latency-sensitive tasks. Use it for the 80% of work that doesn't need Opus.

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