Cost per coding-agent request

Is Codestral or GPT-5.6 Luna cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Codestral costs 1.4x as much as GPT-5.6 Luna per request ($0.0070 vs $0.0051 on our measured traffic), because Codestral lists at $0.30 input, $0.03 cached input and $0.90 output per million tokens against $0.20, $0.02 and $1.20 for GPT-5.6 Luna, and GPT-5.6 Luna charges more for prompts over 272K tokens.

List prices: Mistral API 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 GPT-5.6 Luna and GPT-6 Luna in your agent from $19/month

See plans

Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list price	GPT-5.6 Luna	Codestral
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0032	$0.0043
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.0077	$0.011
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.0051	$0.0070
100 requests	$0.51	$0.70
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.062	$0.084
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$6.42	$8.91

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 256K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

What to watch for

Codestral's 256K window cannot take 13% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. GPT-5.6 Luna is superseded: GPT-6 Luna costs $0.0041 per request.

FAQ

Is GPT-5.6 Luna cheaper than Codestral for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.51 on GPT-5.6 Luna and $0.70 on Codestral. A median 16-request session costs $0.062 vs $0.084. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 256K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of Codestral vs GPT-5.6 Luna cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $8.91 on Codestral and $6.42 on GPT-5.6 Luna at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Codestral vs GPT-5.6 Luna: which is better for agents?

GPT-5.6 Luna scores higher on output quality (7.4/10 vs 3.4/10), while Codestral is the cheaper option. Codestral is best for fast completions and lightweight code edits; GPT-5.6 Luna is best for cheap subtasks in existing GPT-5.6 setups. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Codestral and GPT-5.6 Luna 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 are included with Standard Compute

Standard Compute

Current frontier models Claude Fable 5.1 · GPT-6 Astra

More intelligence
per dollar.

Each step goes to the cheapest model that can do it, on providers we vet for price, uptime and speed, with automatic fallback when one fails.

Compliance: Keep a key, team or company on European or US providers
Privacy: We don’t train on your prompts or store them

Get your API key See how it works

Fixed monthly plans from $19 · cancel anytime

7-day fair refund Free trial, no card Billing by Stripe3,400+ agent users