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DeepSeek V3.5 vs Claude Haiku 4.5

Side-by-side pricing, capabilities, real-world cost across common scenarios, and our editorial pick.

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all prices in USD per 1M tokens
OVERALL WINNER

DeepSeek V3.5

DeepSeek · released 2025-12-01

Quality (AA Index)81
Input price$0.14
Output price$0.28
Context128K
Throughput95 tok/s
P50 latency1.5s
View full pricing

Claude Haiku 4.5

Anthropic · released 2026-04-08

Quality (AA Index)79
Input price$1.00
Output price$5.00
Context200K
Throughput250 tok/s
P50 latency0.4s
View full pricing
Try DeepSeek V3.5 on OpenRouterTry Claude Haiku 4.5 on OpenRouter

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Head-to-head specs

Green column = winner per metric
MetricDeepSeek V3.5Claude Haiku 4.5Verdict
Input price
/1M tokens
$0.14$1.00DeepSeek V3.5 −86%
Output price
/1M tokens
$0.28$5.00DeepSeek V3.5 −94%
Context window
max input length
128K200KClaude Haiku 4.5 +1.6×
AA Quality
AA Intelligence Index (0–100)
8179DeepSeek V3.5 +2pt
Arena Elo
LMArena human-pref Elo (800–2000)
——Tied
Throughput
tokens per second
95250Claude Haiku 4.5 +163%
P50 latency
first token
1.5s0.4sClaude Haiku 4.5 −73%
Vision
multimodal
—
Function calling
tool use
Tied
Reasoning mode
chain-of-thought
—

Monthly cost across common scenarios

Default usage assumptions
ScenarioDeepSeek V3.5Claude Haiku 4.5
customer support
1000K req · 600/180 tok
$134$1.5K
chat with docs
300K req · 4000/300 tok
$193$1.6K
code generation
500K req · 2000/500 tok
$210$2.3K
voice assistant
600K req · 800/200 tok
$101$1.1K
Our pick

For most workloads, choose DeepSeek V3.5.

  • 86% cheaper input price, which compounds at scale

Roughly GPT-4o-class quality at roughly 90% off. Tradeoff is region availability (Chinese provider) and slower output throughput than Western frontier tiers.

Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 instead if: Anthropic’s economy tier — gentler tone, stronger safety patterns than mainstream tiny models. Choose when output voice matters more than raw IQ.

Read our deep analysis

Why pick? Use both with smart routing

Phase 2 · gateway with fallback chain

Set DeepSeek V3.5 as primary, Claude Haiku 4.5 as fallback. One key, one bill, automatic failover when DeepSeek V3.5 errors.

PHASE 2 PREVIEW · gateway not live yetThis endpoint does not exist yet. The gateway is in Phase 2 — what you see below is a design preview of the planned interface, not a live API. We will email subscribers when it launches.
Preview the planned API call
$ curl https://api.aipricly.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AIPC_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "routing": {
      "primary": "deepseek/deepseek-v3-5",
      "fallback": ["anthropic/claude-haiku-4-5"]
    },
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "..."}]
  }'

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