Claude 3.5 Haiku becomes available at a higher price

Background

Claude 3 Haiku was the earlier model in Anthropic's Haiku line, and Anthropic compared the new model with it directly. Anthropic sells its Claude models to developers through an API (application programming interface), a standard way for one program to call another, and through major cloud platforms. For developers who pay by usage, the price per token is often the figure that matters most.

A token is the unit of text a model reads and writes, roughly a word or part of a word. Prices are quoted per million tokens. Input tokens are the text sent to the model, and output tokens are the text it generates. Output is priced higher because generating it takes more computation.

What happened

On 4 November 2024 Claude 3.5 Haiku became available. Anthropic set its price at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, four times the price of Claude 3 Haiku.^[1] The company attributed the higher price to the model's greater intelligence compared with Claude 3 Haiku.^[1]

Key details

At launch the model was text-only. It could be used through the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI, and image input was to follow later.^[2] In its October announcement Anthropic had reported that Claude 3.5 Haiku scored 40.6% on SWE-bench Verified, a coding benchmark that measures how well a model fixes real software problems.^[2]

Impact

About a month after the launch price was set, on 3 December 2024, Anthropic lowered it to $0.80 per million input tokens and $4 per million output tokens.^[2] The change came less than a month after the launch price was announced.^[1][2]

The episode is a small example of how the price of a single model can change after launch, which matters to students and small teams deciding which model to build on. The record shows the two prices and their dates; it does not say how much usage changed in response.