Claude Haiku 4 API: The Budget Developer's Guide to Production-Grade AI TL;DR — Claude Haiku 4 is the most underused model in Anthropic's lineup. At $1 per million input tokens, it handles classification, summarization, and extraction at 90%+ of frontier quality while costing 5x less than Opus 4.7. The trick is knowing exactly where it stops and Sonnet starts. This guide gives you the benchmarks, code, and tiering strategy to run Haiku in production without surprises. Most developers overpay for AI by routing every request to the biggest model. Claude Haiku 4 handles 70% of production tasks at 20% of the cost — you just need to know which 70%. What Claude Haiku 4 Actually Delivers Claude Haiku 4 sits at the bottom of Anthropic's three-tier lineup, but "bottom" is misleading. It shares the same 200K context window as Sonnet and Opus. It supports vision, function calling, and prompt caching. The gap is in reasoning depth, not fundamentals.…