Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Opus 4.8 or Mistral Large 3 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Opus 4.8 costs 11x as much as Mistral Large 3 per request ($0.13 vs $0.012 on our measured traffic), because Claude Opus 4.8 lists at $5 input, $0.50 cached input and $25 output per million tokens against $0.50, $0.05 and $1.50 for Mistral Large 3.

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

Run Claude Opus 5.5 and Mistral Large 4 in your agent from $19/month

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Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list price	Mistral Large 3	Opus 4.8
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0071	$0.079
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.018	$0.19
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.012	$0.13
100 requests	$1.19	$12.72
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.14	$1.54
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$15.10	$161

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 262K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	Mistral Large 3	Opus 4.8
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	9	42
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	0.0%	21.7%
Output speedmedian	73 tokens/s	62 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	1.1 s	66 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Mistral Large 3, speed on Mistral; 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

Mistral Large 3's 262K window cannot take 12% 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 Claude Opus 4.8 is superseded: Claude Opus 5.5 costs $0.11 per request. Mistral Large 3 is superseded: Mistral Large 4 costs $0.042 per request.

FAQ

Is Mistral Large 3 cheaper than Claude Opus 4.8 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $1.19 on Mistral Large 3 and $12.72 on Claude Opus 4.8. A median 16-request session costs $0.14 vs $1.54. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 262K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of Opus 4.8 vs Mistral Large 3 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $161 on Claude Opus 4.8 and $15.10 on Mistral Large 3 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Claude Opus 4.8 vs Mistral Large 3: which is better for agents?

Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher on output quality (8.0/10 vs 3.4/10), while Mistral Large 3 is the cheaper option. Claude Opus 4.8 is best for existing Opus 4.8 setups until they move to Opus 5.5; Mistral Large 3 is best for general open-weight text work where EU provenance matters. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Claude Opus 4.8 and Mistral Large 3 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.