Cost per coding-agent request

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

For coding agents, GPT-5.6 Sol costs 14x as much as Codestral per request ($0.099 vs $0.0070 on our measured traffic), because GPT-5.6 Sol lists at $4 input, $0.40 cached input and $20 output per million tokens against $0.30, $0.03 and $0.90 for Codestral, and GPT-5.6 Sol 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

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Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list price	Codestral	GPT-5.6 Sol
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0043	$0.062
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.011	$0.15
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.0070	$0.099
100 requests	$0.70	$9.94
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.084	$1.19
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$8.91	$125

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 GPT-5.6 Sol is superseded: GPT-6.1 Sol costs $0.067 per request.

FAQ

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

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.70 on Codestral and $9.94 on GPT-5.6 Sol. A median 16-request session costs $0.084 vs $1.19. 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 GPT-5.6 Sol vs Codestral cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $125 on GPT-5.6 Sol and $8.91 on Codestral at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

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

GPT-5.6 Sol scores higher on output quality (8.6/10 vs 3.4/10), while Codestral is the cheaper option. Codestral is best for fast completions and lightweight code edits; GPT-5.6 Sol is best for existing GPT-5.6 Sol setups until they move to GPT-6.1 Sol. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Codestral and GPT-5.6 Sol 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. 1 vote cast so far.

Output Quality

Correctness and depth of what it produces

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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

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Current frontier models Claude Fable 5.1 · GPT-6 Astra

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