Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Haiku 4.5 or GPT-5.5 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GPT-5.5 costs 5.1x as much as Claude Haiku 4.5 per request ($0.11 vs $0.022 on our measured traffic), because GPT-5.5 lists at $5 input, $0.50 cached input and $30 output per million tokens against $1, $0.10 and $5 for Claude Haiku 4.5, and GPT-5.5 charges more for prompts over 272K tokens.

List prices: Anthropic pricing, OpenAI 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

Run Claude Haiku 5.5 in your agent from $19/month

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Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list price	Haiku 4.5	GPT-5.5
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.016	$0.081
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.033	$0.17
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.022	$0.11
100 requests	$2.22	$11.34
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.27	$1.32
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$24.74	$127

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.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	Haiku 4.5	GPT-5.5
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	17	38
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	0.0%	14.6%
Output speedmedian	95 tokens/s	105 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	22 s	71 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Claude 4.5 Haiku (Reasoning), speed on Anthropic; GPT-5.5 (Xhigh), speed on OpenAI. 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

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 Claude Haiku 4.5 is superseded: Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.013 per request. GPT-5.5 is superseded: GPT-6.1 Sol costs $0.067 per request.

FAQ

Is Claude Haiku 4.5 cheaper than GPT-5.5 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $2.22 on Claude Haiku 4.5 and $11.34 on GPT-5.5. A median 16-request session costs $0.27 vs $1.32. 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 GPT-5.5 vs Haiku 4.5 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $127 on GPT-5.5 and $24.74 on Claude Haiku 4.5 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Claude Haiku 4.5 vs GPT-5.5: which is better for agents?

GPT-5.5 scores higher on output quality (7.6/10 vs 4.5/10), while Claude Haiku 4.5 is the cheaper option. Claude Haiku 4.5 is best for short, simple subtasks in setups that still run Haiku 4.5; GPT-5.5 is best for existing GPT-5.5 setups on an API key until they move to GPT-6.1 Sol. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Claude Haiku 4.5 and GPT-5.5 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.