Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Fable 5 or Claude Haiku 4.5 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Fable 5 costs 10x as much as Claude Haiku 4.5 per request ($0.22 vs $0.022 on our measured traffic), because every Claude Fable 5 rate is 10 times Claude Haiku 4.5's.

List prices: Anthropic pricing, checked 2026-10-13. Request costs: Standard Compute gateway data, 79,301 coding-agent requests from 75 users, Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026. How we compute this

Run Claude Fable 5, Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Haiku 5.5 in your agent from $19/month

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Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list price	Haiku 4.5	Fable 5
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.016	$0.16
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.033	$0.33
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.022	$0.22
100 requests	$2.22	$22.16
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.27	$2.66
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$24.74	$247

Each logged request priced at the vendor’s list rates for its own token counts, including cache reads and any higher rate for long prompts. Average output: 698 tokens per request. Both models are priced on the requests up to 200K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	Haiku 4.5	Fable 5
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	17	50
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	0.0%	42.4%
Output speedmedian	95 tokens/s	67 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	22 s	2.3 min

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Claude 4.5 Haiku (Reasoning), speed on Anthropic; Claude Fable 5 (Max, Opus 4.8 Fallback), speed on Anthropic. Fetched October 13, 2026. Artificial Analysis runs Terminal-Bench 4.0 in its own setup, so its scores differ from the tbench.ai leaderboard.

What to watch for

Claude Haiku 4.5's 200K window cannot take 21% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. Claude Fable 5 is superseded: Claude Fable 5.1 costs $0.24 per request. Claude Haiku 4.5 is superseded: Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.013 per request.

FAQ

Is Claude Haiku 4.5 cheaper than Claude Fable 5 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $2.22 on Claude Haiku 4.5 and $22.16 on Claude Fable 5. A median 16-request session costs $0.27 vs $2.66. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 200K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of Fable 5 vs Haiku 4.5 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $247 on Claude Fable 5 and $24.74 on Claude Haiku 4.5 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Haiku 4.5: which is better for agents?

Claude Fable 5 scores higher on output quality (9.0/10 vs 4.5/10), while Claude Haiku 4.5 is the cheaper option. Claude Fable 5 is best for existing Fable 5 setups that have not yet moved to Fable 5.1 or Opus 5.5; Claude Haiku 4.5 is best for short, simple subtasks in setups that still run Haiku 4.5. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Claude Fable 5 and Claude Haiku 4.5 in the same agent?

Yes. Model-agnostic agents (Cline, Aider, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, Kilo Code, OpenCode) let you swap models per task. Many people route hard tasks to the stronger model and routine work to the cheaper one.

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.

Output Quality

Correctness and depth of what it produces

Agentic Ability

Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks

Speed

Tokens per second and time-to-first-token

Value for Money

How much capability you get per dollar

Reliability

Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Current Claude, GPT, Gemini and open models are included with Standard Compute

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Current frontier models Claude Fable 5.1 · GPT-6 Astra

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