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Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Opus 5.5 or Claude Sonnet 5.5 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Opus 5.5 costs 2.0x as much as Claude Sonnet 5.5 per request ($0.11 vs $0.053 on our measured traffic), because every Opus 5.5 rate is exactly double Sonnet 5.5's.

List prices: Anthropic 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 priceSonnet 5.5Opus 5.5
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached$0.026$0.053
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached$0.064$0.13
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached$0.14$0.28
Average request$0.053$0.11
100 requests$5.33$10.66
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes$0.74$1.47
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days$77.42$155

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.

What to watch for

The quality gap is small on public boards: 64.9% vs 61.8% on Terminal-Bench 4.0. Paying double per request is worth it on hard refactors and long autonomous runs; for routine steps Sonnet 5.5 gives most of the result for half the cost.

FAQ

Is Claude Sonnet 5.5 cheaper than Claude Opus 5.5 for coding agents?
Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $5.33 on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and $10.66 on Claude Opus 5.5. A median 16-request session costs $0.74 vs $1.47. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).
How much does a month of Opus 5.5 vs Sonnet 5.5 cost?
For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $155 on Claude Opus 5.5 and $77.42 on Claude Sonnet 5.5 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5.5: which is better for agents?
Claude Opus 5.5 scores higher on output quality (10.0/10 vs 9.8/10), while Claude Sonnet 5.5 is the cheaper option. Claude Opus 5.5 is best for the hardest coding and agent work, as the default flagship instead of Fable; Claude Sonnet 5.5 is best for the everyday default for coding agents, escalating to Opus 5.5 only for the hardest tasks. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.
Can I switch between Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5 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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