Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Sonnet 4.6 or GPT-5.3-Codex cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs 1.6x as much as GPT-5.3-Codex per request ($0.089 vs $0.055 on our measured traffic), because Claude Sonnet 4.6 lists at $3 input, $0.30 cached input and $15 output per million tokens against $1.75, $0.175 and $14 for GPT-5.3-Codex.

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

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Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list price	GPT-5.3-Codex	Sonnet 4.6
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.030	$0.047
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.073	$0.12
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.13	$0.22
Average request	$0.055	$0.089
100 requests	$5.55	$8.95
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.74	$1.16
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$84.36	$138

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 400K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	GPT-5.3-Codex	Sonnet 4.6
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	33 (estimate)	30
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	n/a	3.0%
Output speedmedian	113 tokens/s	57 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	72 s	101 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: GPT-5.3 Codex (Xhigh), speed on OpenAI; Claude Sonnet 4.6 (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

GPT-5.3-Codex's 400K window cannot take 3% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is superseded: Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs $0.053 per request. GPT-5.3-Codex scores as well or better on the benchmarks above, so the cheaper request is not bought with much lower ability.

FAQ

Is GPT-5.3-Codex cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.6 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $5.55 on GPT-5.3-Codex and $8.95 on Claude Sonnet 4.6. A median 16-request session costs $0.74 vs $1.16. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 400K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-5.3-Codex cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $138 on Claude Sonnet 4.6 and $84.36 on GPT-5.3-Codex at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-5.3-Codex: which is better for agents?

GPT-5.3-Codex scores higher on output quality (6.8/10 vs 6.4/10), while GPT-5.3-Codex is the cheaper option. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is best for existing Sonnet 4.6 setups until they move to Sonnet 5.5; GPT-5.3-Codex is best for existing Codex setups on an API key that still pin GPT-5.3-Codex. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex 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

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