GPT-5 mini has the lower listed token price in this exact pairing, but its lifecycle is a major constraint: OpenAI schedules its shutdown for December 11, 2026. Claude Haiku 4.5 is listed as active legacy. That makes this useful for an existing deployment or migration budget, rather than an evergreen recommendation to choose the cheaper model. GPT-5 mini reference, Haiku 4.5 reference. OpenAI’s dated retirement notices.
Researched and written by GPT, an AI, from cited primary sources. Recommendations are editorial assessments; no hands-on performance test is claimed. Numerical examples are calculations under stated assumptions.
Sources checked November 3, 2026.
Anthropic’s “not sooner than” date is not a retirement announcement. If a minimum support date has passed, that alone does not mean the model is shut down. Check the current status and an explicit retirement notice. The newer Haiku 5.5 also has different prices and limits, so do not mix its specifications into a Haiku 4.5 comparison.
What the small-model bill actually says
Haiku 4.5 lists $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens. GPT-5 mini lists $0.25 and $2. For a hypothetical workload totaling two million uncached input tokens and 500,000 billed output tokens, that calculates to $4.50 for Haiku and $1.50 for GPT-5 mini.
The example excludes tools, caches, discounts, taxes and retries, and includes any reasoning billed as output. Different tokenizers can produce different counts for the same text. Treat this as a transparent rate comparison, not a measurement of cost per useful answer.
For a high-volume extraction service, invalid responses and manual repair can dominate a few dollars of token charges. Count successful records, rejected records and reviewer effort alongside the bill. A cheap answer that silently drops a required field is not a successful transaction.
Compare the format you actually need
Haiku 4.5 documents a 200,000-token context and 64,000 maximum output tokens. GPT-5 mini lists a 400,000-token context and 128,000 maximum output. Both accept text and image inputs and return text. Haiku specifications, GPT-5 mini specifications.
Those limits do not establish extraction accuracy. For an invoice-processing test, use clean invoices, rotated scans, credit notes and documents with no invoice number. Specify required fields, allowed null values and how to cite the supporting text. Check totals with ordinary code instead of trusting a model’s arithmetic.
Evaluate whether the model reports uncertainty when the source is unreadable. Include a document with conflicting totals to reveal whether it invents a confident answer. Record preprocessing steps and image resolution because changing the input changes the comparison.
The next choice should be supported and measurable
An existing GPT-5 mini workload needs a migration plan before its documented shutdown. An existing Haiku 4.5 workflow should monitor its legacy status without inventing a retirement date. For new work, compare currently supported successors using the same invoice set and acceptance checks.
Choose a model on accepted records per total dollar, with correction effort included. If a more expensive model only helps on difficult scans, a validated escalation path may be more economical than replacing the entire first pass. That is a hypothesis to test; this article does not claim to have run the benchmark.
Model references
Anthropic · Model library
Claude Haiku 4.5
AvailableExact Haiku 4.5 model, distinct from the newer tiered-price Haiku 5.5.
Author’s assessment; check the guide’s evidence and limitations.- Access
- API
- Input
- text, image
- Output
- text
- Context window
- 200,000 tokens
Catalog checked . Model specifications do not establish access through a particular app or subscription.
OpenAI · Model library
GPT-5 Mini
DeprecatedExact GPT-5 mini endpoint, including its documented retirement constraint.
Author’s assessment; check the guide’s evidence and limitations.- Access
- API
- Input
- text, image
- Output
- text
- Context window
- 400,000 tokens
Catalog checked . Model specifications do not establish access through a particular app or subscription.
