Standard Compute
Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Opus 5.5 or GPT-6 Astra cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GPT-6 Astra costs 3.9x as much as Claude Opus 5.5 per request ($0.41 vs $0.11 on our measured traffic), because Astra's rates are 2.5 times Opus 5.5's and its cache reads five times.

List prices: Anthropic pricing, OpenAI 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 any of these models in your agent from $19/month

See plans

Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list priceOpus 5.5GPT-6 Astra
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached$0.053$0.15
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached$0.13$0.39
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached$0.28$1.71
Average request$0.11$0.41
100 requests$10.66$41.25
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes$1.47$4.49
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days$155$583

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

Opus 5.5 also scores higher on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (64.9% vs 58.2%). If you want OpenAI, GPT-6.1 Sol matches Astra's Terminal-Bench score for $0.067 per request.

FAQ

Is Claude Opus 5.5 cheaper than GPT-6 Astra for coding agents?
Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $10.66 on Claude Opus 5.5 and $41.25 on GPT-6 Astra. A median 16-request session costs $1.47 vs $4.49. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).
How much does a month of GPT-6 Astra vs Opus 5.5 cost?
For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $583 on GPT-6 Astra and $155 on Claude Opus 5.5 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.
Claude Opus 5.5 vs GPT-6 Astra: which is better for agents?
Claude Opus 5.5 scores higher on output quality (10.0/10 vs 9.7/10), while Claude Opus 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; GPT-6 Astra is best for the hardest coding and research tasks in OpenAI-based stacks, where cost is secondary. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.
Can I switch between Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra 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

Related comparisons

The agent matters as much as the model. Compare AI agents →

Every model on this page is included with Standard Compute

Standard Compute

Current frontier models Claude Opus 5.5 · Claude Sonnet 5.5

Your agents never stop.
Your bill never grows.

Frontier models when it counts. Efficient models when it doesn’t. The most intelligence per dollar. One flat bill.

Plans from $19/mo · cancel anytime · 7-day fair refund

7-day fair refund No credit card needed Billing by Stripe1,800+ agent users