Cost per coding-agent request

Is DeepSeek R1 (0528) or GPT-5.5 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GPT-5.5 costs 3.4x as much as DeepSeek R1 (0528) per request ($0.10 vs $0.031 on our measured traffic), because GPT-5.5 lists at $5 input, $0.50 cached input and $30 output per million tokens against $0.50, $0.35 and $2.15 for DeepSeek R1 (0528), and GPT-5.5 charges more for prompts over 272K tokens.

List prices: OpenRouter listed price, 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	DeepSeek R1	GPT-5.5
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.023	$0.081
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.049	$0.16
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.031	$0.10
100 requests	$3.06	$10.41
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.29	$1.15
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$30.90	$101

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 164K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	DeepSeek R1	GPT-5.5
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	13 (estimate)	38
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	n/a	14.6%
Output speedmedian	28 tokens/s	105 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	73 s	71 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: DeepSeek R1 0528 (May '25); GPT-5.5 (Xhigh), speed on OpenAI. 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

DeepSeek R1 (0528)'s 164K window cannot take 28% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. GPT-5.5 is superseded: GPT-6.1 Sol costs $0.067 per request. The price is OpenRouter's listed rate on October 13, 2026, which can be a third-party host's; DeepSeek's own API may charge differently.

FAQ

Is DeepSeek R1 (0528) cheaper than GPT-5.5 for coding agents?

Yes, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $3.06 on DeepSeek R1 (0528) and $10.41 on GPT-5.5. A median 16-request session costs $0.29 vs $1.15. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 164K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of GPT-5.5 vs DeepSeek R1 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $101 on GPT-5.5 and $30.90 on DeepSeek R1 (0528) at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

DeepSeek R1 (0528) vs GPT-5.5: which is better for agents?

GPT-5.5 scores higher on output quality (7.6/10 vs 4.0/10), while DeepSeek R1 (0528) is the cheaper option. DeepSeek R1 (0528) is best for research and comparisons that need the original R1 reasoning model; GPT-5.5 is best for existing GPT-5.5 setups on an API key until they move to GPT-6.1 Sol. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between DeepSeek R1 (0528) and GPT-5.5 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.