Claude Haiku 5.5: a 1M-token context window on the cheap tier
Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5 on 7 October, the third model of the 5.5 family it said would follow Opus 5.5 "in the coming weeks". Its platform docs list a 1M-token context window, up to 128K tokens of output, adaptive thinking, and pricing from $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output, moving to higher rates once prompts pass 100K tokens. It is available through the API and the cloud marketplaces Anthropic lists at launch. The page calls it the "cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model we've ever released" — a vendor claim, not something we have tested.
Haiku-class models are what ride inside the free and low-cost tiers of a hundred subscription apps, so this price line is what a wrapper's marginal request actually costs next month. The practical change is long documents: a million tokens on the cheap tier means feeding an entire contract pile to a summariser stops being an enterprise feature. If a note-taking or document tool on your card has been promising that for a year and charging premium rates for it, check which model it names now.