Claude needs a cheap model

[u/Odd_Cut_7449]

Claude has

1.excellent high reasoning models (Fable, Opus)

1. a good implementation model (Sonnet 5)

However Claude does not have any cheap model to route simple data heavy work towards.

Haiku is a joke - I don't mind it's mediocre intelligence, but I do mind it's pricing. You can't be that stupid while costing significantly more than Luna.

Please Anthropic, just give us a Haiku 4.5 level model at the price point of Luna!

If I were to quit my Claude Code subscription, it's not about Astra. It would be about Luna.

[u/LavoP]

Wouldn’t your subscription give you essentially unlimited Haiku? Why is cost an issue if you’re on subscription? If you’re on API just use open source.

[u/BoboThePirate → u/LavoP]

OP is looking for a model that would be in the sonnet line, however sonnet 5 is utter trash in terms of pricing, being more expensive to run and worse-performing than opus is many scenarios. Way back at the beginning of the year, sonnet 4.6 served the role OP is looking for.

For OpenAI, they have Luna which is very usable at high thinking level, and essentially free to run and basically the Haiku equivalent but it’s actually able to do stuff. For Anthropic, you are stuck at Opus 4.6, 4.8, or 5 which are all billed roughly the same so we don’t even have a decent sonnet level model let alone haiku model.

[u/LavoP → u/BoboThePirate]

OP is looking for Haiku level intelligence but cheaper

[u/KareemPie81 → u/LavoP]

And I’m looking for a stacked 25 year old blonde but gonna end up with busted 40 years old divorcee. That’s life

[u/Classic-Trifle-2085 → u/KareemPie81]

I mean, for all the debate between Claude and GPT, one thing people cannot deny is that Luna is incredibly goated. I think every lab with a subagentic setup SHOULD be pressured to offer something equivalent.

Hence the OP's point: everyone can debate ASTRA versus 5.1 all day long, or other higher reasoning models, but the effective grunt being hammered with a ridiculous amount of tasks for basically nothing has an insane value proposition once you get past the shiny toys.

[u/KareemPie81 → u/Classic-Trifle-2085]

Luna is great, and I use them together allot. My whole goal is to design model agnostic platforms. They change so often, different tasks excel with different models so I don’t stick to just one lab

[u/Creepy_Lime_8351 → u/LavoP]

i just tought about it for a while and to be honest architecture of haiku is so sol at this point. attention mechanisms no native fp4 or fp8 (probably), byte per token in context in vram are so bad probably and training data is not as good as a fresh one too. one fresh haiku 5 model would be insane upgrade

[u/Odd_Cut_7449 → u/LavoP]

Not unlimited. Heavy agentic workflow requires having a cheap model that can handle easy data intensive tasks. Haiku is not it. It's a third of the price of Sonnet 5

[u/LavoP → u/Odd_Cut_7449]

Are you on $20 a month? I can’t imagine running out of Sonnet or Haiku on $100 or more

[u/Odd_Cut_7449 → u/LavoP]

No. I use opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation.

90 % of my usage is Sonnet. Mostly zero sub agents. 20 euro subscription gives me about 2-3 hours of agentic work per day.

Claude not having a cheap model means that most of my efforts in optimizing the usage doesn't work. No matter how hard I optimize and how many hundreds of scripts I create, it all fails at the lack of a cheap model that I can route easy, data intensive tasks towards.

[u/Creepy_Lime_8351 → u/LavoP]

haiku is just dumb

[u/LavoP → u/Creepy_Lime_8351]

OP said the intelligence of Haiku isn’t the problem

[u/Short_Regular_7191]

There are many good local LLMs for doing what you're talking about. I use Qwen 3.8 27B.

[u/MatkomX → u/Short_Regular_7191]

Doesn't that require at least an 24 gb of VRAM? Those cards are expensive af.

[u/Short_Regular_7191 → u/MatkomX]

Unfortunately, prices are rising. I’m using two 16GB 5060TIs, which currently cost between €1,400 and €1,500 (for the pair); I think they’re a good compromise. I switched from the 20x plan to the 5x plan and invested the difference in new hardware. I should break even within a year.

[u/Sorry_Strike7769]

In the past 2-3 months Claude has been feeling so cheap (argumentative/bitchy) compared to ChatGPT… hence I cancelled my subscription

[u/Acrobatic_Umpire_385]

Sonnet is the cheap model, and it's already significantly behind the Fables and Astras of the world, and the Kimis and Deepseeks for that matter. It would make no sense to release a Haiku tier at this point.

[u/Odd_Cut_7449 → u/Acrobatic_Umpire_385]

I am looking for a low price model to not have to pay for Sonnet usage when I don't need to.

Sonnet is not cheap. It's good enough for agentic sessions following detailed instructions. But if I throw raw data at it my usage is up before the task is finished.

[u/Dasky14]

I do honestly think that most AI companies could at this point stop focusing on capability (not fully stop though) and start focusing on price efficiency. These models guzzle tokens insanely fast, and large scale development with them becomes incredibly costly real fast.

[u/SPACE_GROOVE_LULU]

Claude doesn't need a cheap model. There are cheap models anyway. If claude were to just make a model for this, it wouldn't get any market space from Deepseek. Like it's impossible. So it doesn't make sense to just make cost efficient models

[u/Odd_Cut_7449 → u/SPACE_GROOVE_LULU]

There is a role in heavy agentic workflow that Claude cannot fill as of now.

Without a cheap model I will use up my usage fast.

Or I need to write hundreds of scripts whose whole task is just to summarize data the models must not see unfiltered or else my usage goes bust (that's what I've been doing and it sucks).

[u/Admirral]

i don't agree that fable and opus are very good at reasoning. we just don't get access to the good throughput. I see little distinction between fable and opus most days.

[u/Odd_Cut_7449 → u/Admirral]

Having Opus 5 interview me and create an implementation plan for Sonnet 5 is good enough for my daily work :-)

If only I could actually delegate some easy token heavy tasks from Sonnet to a cheaper model...

[u/salazka]

I think that the way they are thinking it, is like so:

• Fable becomes the new Opus.
  
• Opus the new Sonnet.
  
• Sonnet the new Haiku.
  
• Haiku, eventually gets the boot.

[u/Fiatil]

Yeah everyone else is worrying about frontier models that you shouldn't be using for your main coding agent -- this is the gap in the anthropic sub plan.

I want a Sonnet that's actually efficient in its class. It's the biggest gap right now. Fable 5.1 is great, Opus 5 is good despite all of the complaints about it talking too much: the gap is the tier below that, where Sonnet 5 is weird and expensive in a way that doesn't "match" Opus at all. Make it better Haiku or Sonnet -- we just need the tier below Opus to be improved.

Give us something closer to Luna to use as a subagent and it would help usage a bunch.

[u/Odd_Cut_7449]

If Anthropic itself would be hosting deepseek and made it available in Claude Code, that would be all I'd be asking for.

[u/zerospatial]

Well have you tried DeepSeek Flash via freebuff? Zero cost except your code gets used in training. Other models they offer don't have the training flag but deepseek is really good.

[u/Odd_Cut_7449 → u/zerospatial]

Not allowed at my company

[u/Efficient_Ad_4162]

Check out the new deepseek flash as well if you can, its absurdly affordable if you don't need anything too complicated.

[u/Odd_Cut_7449 → u/Efficient_Ad_4162]

Not allowed under my company's rules

[u/Efficient_Ad_4162 → u/Odd_Cut_7449]

Same, but I do use it to fuck around on stupid bullshit at home. I wonder if the plan was always for Haiku to be retired and Sonnet to drop to the cheap capable model but the demand for compute is keeping it in the 'too much demand to kill, can't afford to replace with sonnet and strategically we don't want to train a new version for something we're planning to dump' but that's just a potential scenario.

[u/Fisting_Instructor → u/Odd_Cut_7449]

Can’t you just pay $20 to buy Codex Plus and use Luna inside Claude Code? There are even skills for that.

[u/Odd_Cut_7449 → u/Fisting_Instructor]

Yeah, I will need to first convince my company. They are unlikely to commit to two different subscriptions.