Cost per coding-agent request

Is DeepSeek V4 Flash or MiniMax M3 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, MiniMax M3 costs 1.9x as much as DeepSeek V4 Flash per request ($0.013 vs $0.0067 on our measured traffic), because MiniMax M3 lists at $0.30 input, $0.06 cached input and $1.20 output per million tokens against $0.30, $0.006 and $1.20 for DeepSeek V4 Flash.

List prices: DeepSeek 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	DeepSeek V4 Flash	MiniMax M3
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0033	$0.0060
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.0080	$0.016
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.018	$0.035
Average request	$0.0067	$0.013
100 requests	$0.67	$1.29
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.091	$0.16
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$9.13	$20.98

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.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	DeepSeek V4 Flash	MiniMax M3
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	39	29
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	26.8%	2.0%
Output speedmedian	195 tokens/s	119 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	11 s	18 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Max), speed on DeepSeek; MiniMax-M3, speed on MiniMax. 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

87% of agent input is read from cache, and MiniMax M3 charges $0.06 per million for it against $0.006. DeepSeek V4 Flash is superseded: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash costs $0.0067 per request. DeepSeek figures use its peak-hour rates; the rest of the time it costs half, $0.33 per 100 requests.

FAQ

Is DeepSeek V4 Flash cheaper than MiniMax M3 for coding agents?

Yes, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.67 on DeepSeek V4 Flash and $1.29 on MiniMax M3. A median 16-request session costs $0.091 vs $0.16. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of MiniMax M3 vs DeepSeek V4 Flash cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $20.98 on MiniMax M3 and $9.13 on DeepSeek V4 Flash at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

DeepSeek V4 Flash vs MiniMax M3: which is better for agents?

DeepSeek V4 Flash scores higher on output quality (7.7/10 vs 6.3/10), while DeepSeek V4 Flash is the cheaper option. DeepSeek V4 Flash is best for existing setups that still call the deepseek-v4-flash name; 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 V4 Flash 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

Every model on this page runs on Standard Compute

Standard Compute

Current frontier models Claude Fable 5.1 · GPT-6 Astra

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