What Claude Haiku 5.5's Price Drop Means for Small Business AI Automation

Anthropic just dropped Claude Haiku 5.5's pricing to $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens for prompts under 100,000 tokens — about 75% cheaper than Haiku 4.5. That's not a headline that sounds exciting until you do the math on what it unlocks.

💵 What Actually Changed

For short, high-volume tasks — classifying support tickets, tagging leads, extracting structured data from a form — the per-call cost just dropped by roughly three-quarters. A workflow that cost $40/month to run at scale now costs closer to $10.

🔓 What This Unlocks for Small Teams

Tasks that were previously "too expensive to automate at this volume" start penciling out. Running every single inbound email through a classification step, instead of sampling, becomes affordable. The threshold for "just automate it" moved meaningfully lower.

⚠️ The Part That Doesn't Change

Cheaper inference doesn't fix a badly scoped automation. The task still has to be genuinely narrow (one decision, not a general assistant) for the economics to work — see our earlier piece on why "AI agent" scares small business owners more than it should.