The closest alternative to Claude Haiku 4.5 is Kimi K2 0905 — comparable intelligence (30.9 vs 31.0); for a cheaper option, MiniMax M3 runs $0.300/M vs $1.00/M; for more speed, gpt-oss-120b (free) hits 554 t/s; and the best open-weight substitute is MiniMax M3.
Kimi K2 0905 is the closest alternative to Claude Haiku 4.5, with an Intelligence Index of 30.9 (Claude Haiku 4.5 scores 31.0) at $0.600 per million input tokens.
Yes — MiniMax M3 costs $0.300 per million input tokens versus $1.00 for Claude Haiku 4.5, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
MiniMax M3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Claude Haiku 4.5 — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 54.7 on intelligence.