Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Sonnet 4.6 or Qwen3.7 Plus cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs 7.0x as much as Qwen3.7 Plus per request ($0.097 vs $0.014 on our measured traffic), because Claude Sonnet 4.6 lists at $3 input, $0.30 cached input and $15 output per million tokens against $0.32, $0.064 and $1.28 for Qwen3.7 Plus.

List prices: Anthropic pricing, OpenRouter listed price, 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	Qwen3.7 Plus	Sonnet 4.6
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0064	$0.047
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.017	$0.12
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.038	$0.26
Average request	$0.014	$0.097
100 requests	$1.39	$9.74
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.18	$1.35
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$22.60	$149

Each logged request priced at the listed rates above 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	Qwen3.7 Plus	Sonnet 4.6
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	25	30
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	1.0%	3.0%
Output speedmedian	55 tokens/s	57 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	39 s	101 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Qwen3.7 Plus, speed on Alibaba; 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

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is superseded: Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs $0.053 per request. The price is OpenRouter's listed rate on October 13, 2026, which can be a third-party host's; Alibaba's own API may charge differently. Qwen3.7 Plus scores close to it on the benchmarks above, so the cheaper request is not bought with much lower ability.

FAQ

Is Qwen3.7 Plus cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.6 for coding agents?

Yes, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $1.39 on Qwen3.7 Plus and $9.74 on Claude Sonnet 4.6. A median 16-request session costs $0.18 vs $1.35. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of Sonnet 4.6 vs Qwen3.7 Plus cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $149 on Claude Sonnet 4.6 and $22.60 on Qwen3.7 Plus at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Qwen3.7 Plus: which is better for agents?

Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores higher on output quality (6.4/10 vs 5.7/10), while Qwen3.7 Plus is the cheaper option. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is best for existing Sonnet 4.6 setups until they move to Sonnet 5.5; Qwen3.7 Plus is best for simple, long-context calls on a budget. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Qwen3.7 Plus 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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