Cost per coding-agent request

Is Codestral or Llama 4 Maverick cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Llama 4 Maverick and Codestral cost about the same per request ($0.0072 vs $0.0070 on our measured traffic).

List prices: Mistral API 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	Codestral	Llama 4 Maverick
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0043	$0.0043
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.011	$0.011
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.0070	$0.0072
100 requests	$0.70	$0.72
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.084	$0.080
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$8.91	$9.25

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. 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. 87% of agent input is read from cache, and Llama 4 Maverick charges $0.05 per million for it against $0.03. The price is OpenRouter's listed rate on October 13, 2026, which can be a third-party host's; Meta's own API may charge differently.

FAQ

Is Codestral cheaper than Llama 4 Maverick for coding agents?

Slightly, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.70 on Codestral and $0.72 on Llama 4 Maverick. A median 16-request session costs $0.084 vs $0.080. 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 Llama 4 Maverick vs Codestral cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $9.25 on Llama 4 Maverick and $8.91 on Codestral at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Codestral vs Llama 4 Maverick: which is better for agents?

Llama 4 Maverick scores higher on output quality (3.5/10 vs 3.4/10), while Llama 4 Maverick is the cheaper option. Codestral is best for fast completions and lightweight code edits; Llama 4 Maverick is best for self-hosted setups built on the Llama ecosystem. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Codestral and Llama 4 Maverick 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

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.

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