How to Use Claude Haiku 5.5 for Free ?

Yes, you can use Claude Haiku 5.5 for free, but only in chat: Anthropic says Free plan users can select Haiku 5.5 on Claude.ai, on web, iOS, and Android. The Claude API has no ongoing free tier (new users get only a small test credit), Claude Code isn’t on the Free plan, and a free chat account doesn’t give you an API key. If you want to call claude-haiku-5-5 from code, you pay per token, starting at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens.

Haiku 5.5 shipped on October 7, 2026. This guide covers the free chat route, the honest answer to “is there a free Haiku 5.5 API”, the paid-plan credits people mistake for free access, and the offers that don’t work. For the model itself, read what Claude Haiku 5.5 is; for Claude in general, see our free Claude guide. When you move to the API, Apidog lets you send and inspect a Haiku 5.5 request before you write any code around it.

Every route at a glance

Route 1: the Claude.ai Free plan

This is the simplest free route, open to everyone. Sign up at claude.ai or install the iOS or Android app, open the model picker, and choose Haiku 5.5. Anthropic’s pricing page marks Haiku as included on Free; Opus is not.

Note the wording: Free users “can select” Haiku 5.5. Anthropic doesn’t say it’s the default model on Free, so check the picker before a long conversation.

Anthropic’s Claude.ai system prompt calls Haiku 5.5 “the fastest model for quick questions.” Use it that way:

• Short, repeatable tasks. Summaries, rewrites, classification, and quick lookups are the workloads Anthropic built it for.
• Long material, with care. The API window is 1M tokens, but Anthropic hasn’t published a context limit for the Free plan.
• Hard problems elsewhere. Anthropic positions Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 as better for complex agentic coding. Our free Sonnet 5.5 guide covers the next step up.

A chat entitlement can’t run Claude Code, give you an API key, or drive a script, CI job, or agent.

Is there a free Claude Haiku 5.5 API?

Not in any lasting way. Anthropic’s pricing docs say new users get “a small amount of free credits to test the API,” but there’s no ongoing free tier and no official free Haiku 5.5 API offer. Every request to claude-haiku-5-5 is billed per token. Here’s what comes closest.

Max and Team monthly API credits (a paid perk, not free)

Alongside Haiku 5.5, Anthropic added a monthly API credit for Max and Team subscribers. You pay for the subscription; the credit rides along.

The credits work with any model on the Claude Platform, Haiku 5.5 included, across the Messages API, Message Batches, Managed Agents, the Agent SDK, and the Console Playground. They don’t cover interactive Claude Code, extra usage in the Claude apps, or Claude on Bedrock, Google Cloud, Microsoft Foundry, or Claude Platform on AWS.

Credits expire at the end of each billing cycle with no rollover, and new subscribers can claim them after 7 days. You link one Console organization in claude.ai billing settings and can’t change it yourself. If credits run out with no other balance, API requests stop until next month; usage is never charged to your Claude plan. The Help Center article has the claim steps.

Vercel AI Gateway (unconfirmed)

Vercel lists Haiku 5.5 as anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5, and its model page says “Free users (those who haven’t made a payment) get $5 of credits every 30 days.” It doesn’t say that credit covers Haiku 5.5, so treat the route as unconfirmed until a request succeeds on an account that has never paid. If it does, $5 equals 50M input or 10M output tokens at the up-to-100K rates.

The cheapest paid path

Without Max or Team, create a Console key (our Anthropic API key guide walks through it) and pay list prices:

A request with 2,000 input tokens ($0.0002) and 500 output tokens ($0.00025) costs about $0.00045 at the lower tier. Two caveats: the new tokenizer produces about 30% more tokens for the same text than Haiku 4.5, and a prompt over 100,000 tokens pays the higher prices. The Haiku 5.5 pricing breakdown has worked examples.

Four ways to stretch a small budget:

• Lower the effort. output_config.effort takes low, medium (default), high, xhigh, or max. Anthropic calls low the cheapest and fastest level.
• Turn thinking off where it isn’t needed. thinking: {"type": "disabled"} is accepted at high effort or below. Thinking tokens count toward max_tokens.
• Cache repeated prefixes. The minimum cacheable prompt on Haiku 5.5 is 512 tokens, and cache reads cost $0.01 per million at the lower tier. Our prompt caching explainer covers the mechanics.
• Batch jobs that can wait. The Batch API halves input and output prices.

What is NOT free

These show up in “free Haiku 5.5” searches and don’t deliver.

Claude Code on the Free plan. Claude Code isn’t on Free, and the Max and Team API credits don’t pay for it. Haiku 5.5 needs v2.1.293 or later; our Haiku 5.5 Claude Code guide covers setup.

API access from a Pro plan. Pro isn’t eligible for the monthly API credit, so a Pro subscriber pays per token for every API call.

Google Cloud’s $300 trial. Google says the credit can’t be used for a generative AI partner model offered as a managed API, and free-trial accounts can’t use third-party generative AI models until they upgrade.

Azure’s $200 credit. Microsoft’s offer terms exclude third-party branded products and products sold through Azure Marketplace. Claude is a third-party branded model.

AWS Free Tier. AWS offers new accounts up to $200 in credits, but Bedrock bills Haiku 5.5 through AWS Marketplace. No AWS page we checked says Free Tier credits apply, so assume they don’t.

OpenRouter. As of October 8, 2026, OpenRouter’s model list has no Haiku 5.5 entry, only Haiku 4.5 at $1/$5, and no :free variant.

GitHub Copilot. GitHub hasn’t announced Haiku 5.5, and its supported-models page lists Haiku 4.5 only.

Cursor Hobby. Haiku 5.5 bills from Cursor’s “Other Models” pool, included on Pro, Pro Plus, and Ultra. Nothing official says Hobby can use it.

Third-party “Haiku 5.5” chatbots. One we checked on a chatbot aggregator was made by an unrelated user and runs on a different company’s model. Use Claude.ai and the official apps.

Test your first Haiku 5.5 request in Apidog

Once you have a key, test the request before building on it. In Apidog, store ANTHROPIC_API_KEY as an environment variable so the key never sits inside a shared request.

Import this cURL command, then swap $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY for {{ANTHROPIC_API_KEY}}:

curl https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages \
  -H "x-api-key: $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" \
  -H "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "claude-haiku-5-5",
    "max_tokens": 1024,
    "thinking": {"type": "disabled"},
    "output_config": {"effort": "low"},
    "messages": [
      {"role": "user", "content": "Classify this ticket as billing, bug, or feature request: The export button returns a 500 error."}
    ]
  }'

Send it and read the usage object to see the tokens you were billed for. Then save the request with two assertions:

• stop_reason, not only the HTTP status. Haiku 5.5 runs safety classifiers that can decline a request with stop_reason: "refusal", which is new if you’re coming from Haiku 4.5.
• usage within budget. Rerun when you change effort or the prompt, and compare.

Copying an old Haiku 4.5 request? Remove temperature, top_p, top_k, any budget_tokens thinking config, and any assistant prefill. Each can return a 400 on Haiku 5.5. The Haiku 5.5 vs Haiku 4.5 guide lists every breaking change, and the Haiku 5.5 API guide goes deeper on effort, thinking, and caching.

FAQ

Is Claude Haiku 5.5 free? Yes, in chat. Free plan users can select Haiku 5.5 on Claude.ai, on web, iOS, and Android. The API and Claude Code are paid.

Is Haiku 5.5 the default model on Claude’s Free plan? Anthropic hasn’t said so. It states only that Free users can select Haiku 5.5, so check the model picker.

Can I get a free Claude Haiku 5.5 API key? Not a lasting one. New API users get only a small test credit, and a chat plan doesn’t include an API key. Max and Team plans come with monthly API credits, but those are part of a paid subscription.

Do the Max and Team API credits work in Claude Code? No. They cover the Claude API, Message Batches, Managed Agents, the Agent SDK, and the Console Playground, not interactive Claude Code or cloud platforms.

Is GPT-6 Luna a free alternative? GPT-6 Luna has the same $0.10/$0.50 list price for short prompts, and OpenAI lets Free and Go users access it in the desktop app, not in Chat. Our GPT-6 Luna free guide and Haiku 5.5 vs GPT-6 Luna comparison cover both.

Start in chat, then pay pennies for the API

Open claude.ai or the mobile app and select Haiku 5.5 for quick, repeatable tasks. When you need it in a script or agent, check whether you already have Max or Team API credits; if not, a small Console balance goes a long way at $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens for prompts up to 100K. Download Apidog to send your first claude-haiku-5-5 request, assert on stop_reason and usage, and keep the key in an environment variable from day one.