Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Haiku 4.5 or Llama 4 Maverick cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Haiku 4.5 costs 3.5x as much as Llama 4 Maverick per request ($0.022 vs $0.0063 on our measured traffic), because Claude Haiku 4.5 lists at $1 input, $0.10 cached input and $5 output per million tokens against $0.188, $0.05 and $0.653 for Llama 4 Maverick.

List prices: Anthropic pricing, OpenRouter listed price, 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 priceLlama 4 MaverickHaiku 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$0.0099$0.033
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cachedn/an/a
Average request$0.0063$0.022
100 requests$0.63$2.22
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes$0.068$0.27
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days$6.63$24.74

Each logged request priced at the listed rates above 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 AnalysisLlama 4 MaverickHaiku 4.5
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 10010 (estimate)17
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal0.0%0.0%
Output speedmedian44 tokens/s95 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time1.1 s22 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Llama 4 Maverick; Claude 4.5 Haiku (Reasoning), 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

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 Claude Haiku 4.5 is superseded: Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.013 per request. The price is OpenRouter's listed rate on October 13, 2026, which can be a third-party host's; Meta's own API may charge differently.

FAQ

Is Llama 4 Maverick cheaper than Claude Haiku 4.5 for coding agents?
Yes, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.63 on Llama 4 Maverick and $2.22 on Claude Haiku 4.5. A median 16-request session costs $0.068 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 Llama 4 Maverick cost?
For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $24.74 on Claude Haiku 4.5 and $6.63 on Llama 4 Maverick at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.
Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Llama 4 Maverick: which is better for agents?
Claude Haiku 4.5 scores higher on output quality (4.5/10 vs 3.5/10), while Llama 4 Maverick is the cheaper option. Claude Haiku 4.5 is best for short, simple subtasks in setups that still run Haiku 4.5; Llama 4 Maverick is best for self-hosted setups built on the Llama ecosystem. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.
Can I switch between Claude Haiku 4.5 and Llama 4 Maverick 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

Related comparisons

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