Is Claude Haiku 4.5 a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Claude Haiku 4.5 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 Haiku 4.5 is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. Gemini 3.8 Flash scores 98.1 higher and costs 25% less, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
Gemini 3.8 Flash is both better and cheaper than Claude Haiku 4.5: 98.1 points higher on LMArena and 25% less per million tokens, $0.50 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1396.6
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$2.00/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1494.7
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$1.50/M
Claude Haiku 4.5 takes text, image, file, returns up to 64,000 tokens from a 200,000-token context, and is listed by 8 sellers.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 11 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Claude Haiku 4.5 scores 1396.6 at $2.00 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | 1494.7 +98.1 | $1.50/M | 25% |
| Gemini 3.7 Flash | 1490.5 +93.9 | $1.50/M | 25% |
| Muse Spark 1.3 | 1489.7 +93.1 | $2.00/M | 0% |
| Muse Spark 1.1 | 1480.2 +83.6 | $2.00/M | 0% |
| Gemini 3.6 Flash | 1476.1 +79.5 | $1.50/M | 25% |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | 1435.5 +38.9 | $0.850/M | 57% |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | 1429.9 +33.3 | $0.450/M | 78% |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash | 1417.3 +20.7 | $0.850/M | 57% |
| Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview | 1415.3 +18.7 | $0.563/M | 72% |
| GPT-5.4 Mini | 1412.1 +15.5 | $1.69/M | 16% |
| Grok 4.3 | 1397.7 +1.1 | $1.56/M | 22% |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLM 5.3 | 1475.1 | $1.29/M | image, file |
| GLM 5.3 Flash | 1471.9 | $0.237/M | file |
| GLM 5.2 | 1466.9 | $0.998/M | image, file |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro | 1464.8 | $0.544/M | image, file |
| GLM 5.1 | 1462.4 | $1.48/M | image, file |
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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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