Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Opus 4.8 or DeepSeek V3.2 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Opus 4.8 costs 8.0x as much as DeepSeek V3.2 per request ($0.10 vs $0.013 on our measured traffic), because Claude Opus 4.8 lists at $5 input, $0.50 cached input and $25 output per million tokens against $0.259, $0.14 and $0.80 for DeepSeek V3.2.

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 price	DeepSeek V3.2	Opus 4.8
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0095	$0.079
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.020	$0.15
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.013	$0.10
100 requests	$1.27	$10.15
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.13	$1.15
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$12.93	$98.64

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 164K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	DeepSeek V3.2	Opus 4.8
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	21 (estimate)	42
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	n/a	21.7%
Output speedmedian	n/a	62 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	n/a	66 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: DeepSeek V3.2 (Reasoning), speed on DeepSeek; Claude Opus 4.8 (Max), 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

DeepSeek V3.2's 164K window cannot take 28% 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 Claude Opus 4.8 is superseded: Claude Opus 5.5 costs $0.11 per request. The price is OpenRouter's listed rate on October 13, 2026, which can be a third-party host's; DeepSeek's own API may charge differently.

FAQ

Is DeepSeek V3.2 cheaper than Claude Opus 4.8 for coding agents?

Yes, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $1.27 on DeepSeek V3.2 and $10.15 on Claude Opus 4.8. A median 16-request session costs $0.13 vs $1.15. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 164K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of Opus 4.8 vs DeepSeek V3.2 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $98.64 on Claude Opus 4.8 and $12.93 on DeepSeek V3.2 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Claude Opus 4.8 vs DeepSeek V3.2: which is better for agents?

Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher on output quality (8.0/10 vs 5.2/10), while DeepSeek V3.2 is the cheaper option. Claude Opus 4.8 is best for existing Opus 4.8 setups until they move to Opus 5.5; DeepSeek V3.2 is best for existing V3.2 setups with short prompts. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Claude Opus 4.8 and DeepSeek V3.2 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.