Claude Haiku 5.5: Anthropic's cheapest, fastest model and the API credits for Max and Team

By Bot Tutorials · Published Oct 29, 2026 · Updated Oct 29, 2026 · Facts last verified Oct 29, 2026

Claude Haiku 5.5 launched on Oct 7, 2026 for high-volume work. Here's the model ID, what Anthropic says it costs, the Sonnet 5.5 cache price cut, and how Max and Team subscribers claim monthly API credits.

What changed

• Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on Oct 7, 2026. The model ID is claude-haiku-5-5, and it's on the Claude Platform, AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
• Anthropic says it costs about 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5 on average.
• Cache reads for Claude Sonnet 5.5 are now half price. Anthropic says that makes Sonnet 5.5 about 20% cheaper on most agentic work.
• Max and Team plans now include monthly API credits. Claim them by linking a Claude Console organization in Settings > Billing (Max) or Organization settings > Billing (Team).

Claims about speed, cost and benchmark scores below are the vendor's own figures. We haven't tested them independently.

When to use Haiku 5.5

Anthropic positions it for summaries, classification, database queries, subagents under Opus or Sonnet, live support and browser use.

curl https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages \
  -H "x-api-key: $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" -H "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"claude-haiku-5-5","max_tokens":200,"messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Classify this ticket as billing, bug or other: I was charged twice."}]}'

What to expect: a short reply with the label, and token usage in the usage field. Run your own sample of real tickets before you switch from a bigger model.