The closest alternative to Claude 3.5 Haiku is Mistral Small 4 — comparable intelligence (18.6 vs 18.7); for a cheaper option, MiniMax M3 runs $0.300/M vs $0.800/M; for more speed, gpt-oss-120b (free) hits 554 t/s; and the best open-weight substitute is MiniMax M3.
Mistral Small 4 is the closest alternative to Claude 3.5 Haiku, with an Intelligence Index of 18.6 (Claude 3.5 Haiku scores 18.7) at $0.150 per million input tokens.
Yes — MiniMax M3 costs $0.300 per million input tokens versus $0.800 for Claude 3.5 Haiku, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
MiniMax M3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Claude 3.5 Haiku — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 54.7 on intelligence.