Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Opus 4.8 or Grok 4.20 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Opus 4.8 costs 2.4x as much as Grok 4.20 per request ($0.16 vs $0.068 on our measured traffic), because Claude Opus 4.8 lists at $5 input, $0.50 cached input and $25 output per million tokens against $1.25, $0.20 and $2.50 for Grok 4.20, and Grok 4.20 charges more for prompts 200K tokens or more.

List prices: Anthropic pricing, xAI models and 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	Grok 4.20	Opus 4.8
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.021	$0.079
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.077	$0.20
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.26	$0.43
Average request	$0.068	$0.16
100 requests	$6.84	$16.23
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.61	$2.25
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$103	$249

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.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	Grok 4.20	Opus 4.8
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	26 (estimate)	42
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	n/a	21.7%
Output speedmedian	95 tokens/s	62 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	21 s	66 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Grok 4.20 0309 v2 (Reasoning), speed on SpaceXAI; 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

Claude Opus 4.8 is superseded: Claude Opus 5.5 costs $0.11 per request. Claude Opus 4.8 scores clearly higher on the benchmarks above, so it may finish hard tasks in fewer steps.

FAQ

Is Grok 4.20 cheaper than Claude Opus 4.8 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $6.84 on Grok 4.20 and $16.23 on Claude Opus 4.8. A median 16-request session costs $0.61 vs $2.25. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of Opus 4.8 vs Grok 4.20 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $249 on Claude Opus 4.8 and $103 on Grok 4.20 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Claude Opus 4.8 vs Grok 4.20: which is better for agents?

Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher on output quality (8.0/10 vs 5.8/10), while Grok 4.20 is the cheaper option. Claude Opus 4.8 is best for existing Opus 4.8 setups until they move to Opus 5.5; Grok 4.20 is best for runs that need more than 1M tokens of context. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Claude Opus 4.8 and Grok 4.20 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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