What changed
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026. For prompts up to 100,000 tokens (roughly 75,000 words), it costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens. That's 75% cheaper than Haiku 4.5, which cost $1.00 and $5.00. For context, a million tokens is about the first five Harry Potter books. A dime now reads all five.
Anthropic also announced monthly API credits for subscribers: Max 5x users get $100/month, Max 20x get $200/month, and Team plans get up to $500 pooled across users. Credits expire each month—use them or lose them. They cover any model on the Claude API but not Claude Code sessions.
What you can do with it this week
If you've been holding back on automating high-volume tasks because the API bill scared you, run the numbers again. Summarizing customer support tickets, classifying incoming emails, answering routine questions, extracting data from invoices—jobs that used to add up now cost a fraction. At ten cents per million tokens in, a thousand summaries of 500-word documents costs about four cents.
If you subscribe to Max or Team, claim your monthly API credit through Claude's billing settings. Link your API organization to your plan. Spend it on experimenting with automations you've been putting off. The credits don't roll over, so use them this month.
What to keep in your own hands
Don't paste sensitive customer data, employee records, or proprietary pricing into the API without checking Anthropic's data policy first. Understand what gets logged, how long it's kept, and whether it trains future models. Set a hard spend cap in your API settings so a runaway script can't blow through your budget. And keep the final call—approval, rejection, the wording of a customer reply—with a person. Cheap AI makes it tempting to automate the decision, not just the draft.