Cost per coding-agent request

Is DeepSeek V3.2 or MiniMax M3 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, DeepSeek V3.2 costs 1.6x as much as MiniMax M3 per request ($0.013 vs $0.0079 on our measured traffic), because DeepSeek V3.2 lists at $0.259 input, $0.14 cached input and $0.80 output per million tokens against $0.30, $0.06 and $1.20 for MiniMax M3.

List prices: 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	MiniMax M3	DeepSeek V3.2
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0060	$0.0095
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.012	$0.020
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.0079	$0.013
100 requests	$0.79	$1.27
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.084	$0.13
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$8.02	$12.93

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	MiniMax M3	DeepSeek V3.2
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	29	21 (estimate)
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	2.0%	n/a
Output speedmedian	119 tokens/s	n/a
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	18 s	n/a

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: MiniMax-M3, speed on MiniMax; DeepSeek V3.2 (Reasoning), speed on DeepSeek. 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 V3.2's 164K window cannot take 28% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. 87% of agent input is read from cache, and DeepSeek V3.2 charges $0.14 per million for it against $0.06. 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 MiniMax M3 cheaper than DeepSeek V3.2 for coding agents?

Yes, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.79 on MiniMax M3 and $1.27 on DeepSeek V3.2. A median 16-request session costs $0.084 vs $0.13. 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 DeepSeek V3.2 vs MiniMax M3 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $12.93 on DeepSeek V3.2 and $8.02 on MiniMax M3 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

DeepSeek V3.2 vs MiniMax M3: which is better for agents?

MiniMax M3 scores higher on output quality (6.3/10 vs 5.2/10), while DeepSeek V3.2 is the cheaper option. DeepSeek V3.2 is best for existing V3.2 setups with short prompts; MiniMax M3 is best for agents that need an open-weight model with a 1M context. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between DeepSeek V3.2 and MiniMax M3 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

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