Claude Haiku beat DeepSeek V4 on speed and reliability
was compared with and Flash in a workflow that creates Upwork proposals through Details, Questions, and Proposal steps. Each model handled three real freelance job listings, producing nine live runs in total. completed every run and was 3–10 times faster end to end than the two DeepSeek options.
With reasoning set to the maximum X-High level, spent 67 seconds on the Details step for the longest job, then timed out while extracting questions and found none. In one sampled Pro Details call, 91% of its were hidden rather than the visible summary; after counting that overhead, Pro was not meaningfully cheaper than Haiku. cost about one-third as much per job as Haiku, but it remained 3–5 times slower and timed out once while generating an answer.
The test covered only three jobs, so the results may not hold across other workloads.
Key points
- Three models were tested on three real Upwork jobs, for nine runs in total.
- had no failures and finished 3–10 times faster than the DeepSeek models.
- timed out during question extraction on the longest job and returned zero questions.
- Hidden made up 91% of one sampled Pro call's .
- cost about one-third as much as Haiku but was 3–5 times slower and failed once.