Cost per coding-agent request

Is DeepSeek V4 Pro or GPT-5.6 Sol cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GPT-5.6 Sol costs 5.4x as much as DeepSeek V4 Pro per request ($0.17 vs $0.030 on our measured traffic), because GPT-5.6 Sol lists at $4 input, $0.40 cached input and $20 output per million tokens against $1.32, $0.044 and $3.96 for DeepSeek V4 Pro, and GPT-5.6 Sol charges more for prompts over 272K tokens.

List prices: DeepSeek 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	DeepSeek V4 Pro	GPT-5.6 Sol
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.014	$0.062
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.036	$0.16
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.084	$0.68
Average request	$0.030	$0.17
100 requests	$3.04	$16.50
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.41	$1.80
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$42.42	$233

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.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	DeepSeek V4 Pro	GPT-5.6 Sol
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	36	47
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	14.1%	39.9%
Output speedmedian	99 tokens/s	94 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	22 s	2.1 min

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (Max), speed on DeepSeek; GPT-5.6 Sol (Max), 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

The gap widens on long prompts: under 100K tokens GPT-5.6 Sol costs 4.3x as much per request, over 272K 8.2x. 87% of agent input is read from cache, and GPT-5.6 Sol charges $0.40 per million for it against $0.044. GPT-5.6 Sol is superseded: GPT-6.1 Sol costs $0.067 per request.

FAQ

Is DeepSeek V4 Pro cheaper than GPT-5.6 Sol for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $3.04 on DeepSeek V4 Pro and $16.50 on GPT-5.6 Sol. A median 16-request session costs $0.41 vs $1.80. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of GPT-5.6 Sol vs DeepSeek V4 Pro cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $233 on GPT-5.6 Sol and $42.42 on DeepSeek V4 Pro at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

DeepSeek V4 Pro vs GPT-5.6 Sol: which is better for agents?

GPT-5.6 Sol scores higher on output quality (8.6/10 vs 7.2/10), while DeepSeek V4 Pro is the cheaper option. DeepSeek V4 Pro is best for self-hosted setups that want DeepSeek's larger V4 model; 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 DeepSeek V4 Pro 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.

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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

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