Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Haiku 4.5 or Codestral cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Haiku 4.5 costs 3.6x as much as Codestral per request ($0.022 vs $0.0062 on our measured traffic), because Claude Haiku 4.5 lists at $1 input, $0.10 cached input and $5 output per million tokens against $0.30, $0.03 and $0.90 for Codestral.

List prices: Anthropic pricing, Mistral 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	Codestral	Haiku 4.5
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0043	$0.016
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.0094	$0.033
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.0062	$0.022
100 requests	$0.61	$2.22
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.072	$0.27
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$6.61	$24.74

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 200K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

What to watch for

Claude Haiku 4.5's 200K window cannot take 21% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. Claude Haiku 4.5 is superseded: Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.013 per request.

FAQ

Is Codestral cheaper than Claude Haiku 4.5 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.61 on Codestral and $2.22 on Claude Haiku 4.5. A median 16-request session costs $0.072 vs $0.27. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 200K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of Haiku 4.5 vs Codestral cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $24.74 on Claude Haiku 4.5 and $6.61 on Codestral at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Codestral: which is better for agents?

Claude Haiku 4.5 scores higher on output quality (4.5/10 vs 3.4/10), while Codestral is the cheaper option. Claude Haiku 4.5 is best for short, simple subtasks in setups that still run Haiku 4.5; Codestral is best for fast completions and lightweight code edits. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Claude Haiku 4.5 and Codestral 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.

Output Quality

Correctness and depth of what it produces

Agentic Ability

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

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

Current Claude, GPT, Gemini and open models run on Standard Compute

Standard Compute

Current frontier models Claude Fable 5.1 · GPT-6 Astra

More intelligence
per dollar.

Each step goes to the cheapest model that can do it, on providers we vet for price, uptime and speed, with automatic fallback when one fails.

Compliance: Opt-in rules keep a company, team or key on European or US providers
Privacy: We don’t train on your prompts or store them

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