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Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Opus 4.8 or Codestral cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Opus 4.8 costs 18x as much as Codestral per request ($0.13 vs $0.0070 on our measured traffic), because Claude Opus 4.8 lists at $5 input, $0.50 cached input and $25 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 priceCodestralOpus 4.8
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached$0.0043$0.079
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached$0.011$0.19
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cachedn/an/a
Average request$0.0070$0.13
100 requests$0.70$12.52
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes$0.084$1.52
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days$8.91$159

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 256K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

What to watch for

Codestral's 256K window cannot take 13% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. Claude Opus 4.8 is superseded: Claude Opus 5.5 costs $0.11 per request.

FAQ

Is Codestral cheaper than Claude Opus 4.8 for coding agents?
Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.70 on Codestral and $12.52 on Claude Opus 4.8. A median 16-request session costs $0.084 vs $1.52. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 256K tokens that both can take.
How much does a month of Opus 4.8 vs Codestral cost?
For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $159 on Claude Opus 4.8 and $8.91 on Codestral at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.
Claude Opus 4.8 vs Codestral: which is better for agents?
Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher on output quality (8.0/10 vs 3.4/10), while Codestral is the cheaper option. Claude Opus 4.8 is best for existing Opus 4.8 setups until they move to Opus 5.5; 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 Opus 4.8 and Codestral 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.

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

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