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Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Sonnet 5.5 or GPT-6.1 Sol cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GPT-6.1 Sol costs 1.3x as much as Claude Sonnet 5.5 per request ($0.067 vs $0.053 on our measured traffic), because GPT-6.1 Sol doubles input and adds half to output over 272K tokens, and Sonnet 5.5 has no such surcharge.

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 priceSonnet 5.5GPT-6.1 Sol
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached$0.026$0.026
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached$0.064$0.063
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached$0.14$0.28
Average request$0.053$0.067
100 requests$5.33$6.74
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes$0.74$0.74
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days$77.42$90.04

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

Both list at $2/$10 with $0.10 cache reads, so under 272K tokens they cost the same per request. The whole gap comes from the 11% of requests above that line, where GPT-6.1 Sol costs $0.28 against $0.14. If your agent compacts its context or starts fresh sessions, the gap shrinks. They score close together on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (61.8% vs 58.2%).

FAQ

Is Claude Sonnet 5.5 cheaper than GPT-6.1 Sol for coding agents?
Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $5.33 on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and $6.74 on GPT-6.1 Sol. A short, median 16-request session costs about $0.74 on both, because the difference sits in longer prompts. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).
How much does a month of GPT-6.1 Sol vs Sonnet 5.5 cost?
For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $90.04 on GPT-6.1 Sol and $77.42 on Claude Sonnet 5.5 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs GPT-6.1 Sol: which is better for agents?
Claude Sonnet 5.5 scores higher on output quality (9.8/10 vs 9.6/10), while GPT-6.1 Sol is the cheaper option. Claude Sonnet 5.5 is best for the everyday default for coding agents, escalating to Opus 5.5 only for the hardest tasks; GPT-6.1 Sol is best for the default OpenAI model for coding agents, from routine changes to hard tasks. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.
Can I switch between Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol 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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