Is Claude 3 Haiku a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Claude 3 Haiku on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.
13 undominated of 136 · Sep 23, 2026
As of Sep 23, 2026, Claude 3 Haiku is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 277.3 higher and costs 53% less, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
GLM 5.3 Flash is both better and cheaper than Claude 3 Haiku: 277.3 points higher on LMArena and 53% less per million tokens, $0.26 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1194.6
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.500/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1471.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.237/M
Claude 3 Haiku takes text, image, returns up to 4,096 tokens from a 200,000-token context, and is listed by 1 seller.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 9 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Claude 3 Haiku scores 1194.6 at $0.50 per million tokens for this mix.
Envelope-safe replacements
Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLM 5.3 Flash | 1471.9 +277.3 | $0.237/M | 53% |
| Gemma 4 31B | 1441.7 +247.1 | $0.153/M | 70% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1434.5 +239.9 | $0.143/M | 72% |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | 1429.9 +235.3 | $0.450/M | 10% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.4 +232.8 | $0.175/M | 65% |
| Qwen3.5-Flash | 1397.7 +203.1 | $0.114/M | 77% |
| GPT-5.4 Nano | 1372.9 +178.3 | $0.463/M | 7% |
| GPT-5 Nano | 1319.7 +125.1 | $0.138/M | 73% |
| GPT-4.1 Nano | 1284.7 +90.1 | $0.175/M | 65% |
Higher score, lower price, named losses
Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You give up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hy3 | 1440.6 | $0.144/M | image |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1431.8 | $0.103/M | image |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | 1424.8 | $0.302/M | context, image |
| DeepSeek V3.2 Exp | 1422.6 | $0.305/M | context, image |
| Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 | 1419.8 | $0.153/M | image |
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Saved decision references
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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