Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Fable 5 or DeepSeek V4 Flash cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Fable 5 costs 49x as much as DeepSeek V4 Flash per request ($0.32 vs $0.0067 on our measured traffic), because Claude Fable 5 lists at $10 input, $1 cached input and $50 output per million tokens against $0.30, $0.006 and $1.20 for DeepSeek V4 Flash.

List prices: Anthropic pricing, DeepSeek API 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

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Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list price	DeepSeek V4 Flash	Fable 5
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0033	$0.16
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.0080	$0.39
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.018	$0.87
Average request	$0.0067	$0.32
100 requests	$0.67	$32.47
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.091	$4.49
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$9.13	$497

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.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	DeepSeek V4 Flash	Fable 5
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	39	50
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	26.8%	42.4%
Output speedmedian	195 tokens/s	67 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	11 s	2.3 min

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Max), speed on DeepSeek; Claude Fable 5 (Max, Opus 4.8 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

87% of agent input is read from cache, and Claude Fable 5 charges $1 per million for it against $0.006. Claude Fable 5 is superseded: Claude Fable 5.1 costs $0.24 per request. DeepSeek V4 Flash is superseded: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash costs $0.0067 per request.

FAQ

Is DeepSeek V4 Flash cheaper than Claude Fable 5 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.67 on DeepSeek V4 Flash and $32.47 on Claude Fable 5. A median 16-request session costs $0.091 vs $4.49. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of Fable 5 vs DeepSeek V4 Flash cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $497 on Claude Fable 5 and $9.13 on DeepSeek V4 Flash at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Claude Fable 5 vs DeepSeek V4 Flash: which is better for agents?

Claude Fable 5 scores higher on output quality (9.0/10 vs 7.7/10), while DeepSeek V4 Flash is the cheaper option. Claude Fable 5 is best for existing Fable 5 setups that have not yet moved to Fable 5.1 or Opus 5.5; DeepSeek V4 Flash is best for existing setups that still call the deepseek-v4-flash name. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Claude Fable 5 and DeepSeek V4 Flash in the same agent?

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

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time. 2 votes cast so far.

Output Quality

Correctness and depth of what it produces

0%1 vote100%

Agentic Ability

Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks

0%1 vote100%

Speed

Tokens per second and time-to-first-token

Value for Money

How much capability you get per dollar

Reliability

Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Every model on this page is included with Standard Compute

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Current frontier models Claude Fable 5.1 · GPT-6 Astra

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