Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Fable 5.1 or Grok 4.7 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Fable 5.1 costs 1.7x as much as Grok 4.7 per request ($0.22 vs $0.13 on our measured traffic), because Claude Fable 5.1 lists at $10 input, $0.25 cached input and $50 output per million tokens against $2, $0.50 and $6 for Grok 4.7, and Grok 4.7 charges more for prompts 200K tokens or more.

List prices: Anthropic pricing, xAI models and pricing, checked 2026-10-13. Request costs: Standard Compute gateway data, 79,301 coding-agent requests from 75 users, Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026. How we compute this

Run Claude Fable 5.1 in your agent from $19/month

See plans

Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list price	Grok 4.7	Fable 5.1
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.044	$0.12
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.16	$0.28
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.48	$0.55
Average request	$0.13	$0.22
100 requests	$13.16	$22.49
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$1.21	$3.17
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$222	$322

Each logged request priced at the vendor’s list rates for its own token counts, including cache reads and any higher rate for long prompts. Average output: 698 tokens per request. Both models are priced on the requests up to 500K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	Grok 4.7	Fable 5.1
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	46	53
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	25.8%	52.0%
Output speedmedian	86 tokens/s	71 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	101 s	4.0 min

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Grok 4.7 (Xhigh), speed on SpaceXAI; Claude Fable 5.1 (Max, Default Fallback), speed on Anthropic. Fetched October 13, 2026. Artificial Analysis runs Terminal-Bench 4.0 in its own setup, so its scores differ from the tbench.ai leaderboard.

What to watch for

Grok 4.7's 500K window cannot take 1% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. Claude Fable 5.1 scores clearly higher on the benchmarks above, so it may finish hard tasks in fewer steps.

FAQ

Is Grok 4.7 cheaper than Claude Fable 5.1 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $13.16 on Grok 4.7 and $22.49 on Claude Fable 5.1. A median 16-request session costs $1.21 vs $3.17. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 500K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of Fable 5.1 vs Grok 4.7 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $322 on Claude Fable 5.1 and $222 on Grok 4.7 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Claude Fable 5.1 vs Grok 4.7: which is better for agents?

Claude Fable 5.1 scores higher on output quality (9.4/10 vs 8.6/10), while Grok 4.7 is the cheaper option. Claude Fable 5.1 is best for teams already standardized on Fable that want the newest premium Claude; Grok 4.7 is best for output-heavy agent work with prompts under 200K tokens. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Claude Fable 5.1 and Grok 4.7 in the same agent?

Yes. Model-agnostic agents (Cline, Aider, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, Kilo Code, OpenCode, Continue) let you swap models per task. Many people route hard tasks to the stronger model and routine work to the cheaper one.