Cost per coding-agent request

Is DeepSeek V4 Pro or Grok 4.20 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Grok 4.20 costs 2.2x as much as DeepSeek V4 Pro per request ($0.068 vs $0.030 on our measured traffic), because Grok 4.20 lists at $1.25 input, $0.20 cached input and $2.50 output per million tokens against $1.32, $0.044 and $3.96 for DeepSeek V4 Pro, and Grok 4.20 charges more for prompts 200K tokens or more.

List prices: DeepSeek API pricing, xAI models and 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	Grok 4.20
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.014	$0.021
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.036	$0.077
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.084	$0.26
Average request	$0.030	$0.068
100 requests	$3.04	$6.84
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.41	$0.61
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$42.42	$103

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	Grok 4.20
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	36	26 (estimate)
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	14.1%	n/a
Output speedmedian	99 tokens/s	95 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	22 s	21 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (Max), speed on DeepSeek; Grok 4.20 0309 v2 (Reasoning), speed on SpaceXAI. 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 Grok 4.20 costs 1.4x as much per request, over 272K 3.1x. 87% of agent input is read from cache, and Grok 4.20 charges $0.20 per million for it against $0.044. DeepSeek figures use its peak-hour rates; the rest of the time it costs half, $1.52 per 100 requests.

FAQ

Is DeepSeek V4 Pro cheaper than Grok 4.20 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $3.04 on DeepSeek V4 Pro and $6.84 on Grok 4.20. A median 16-request session costs $0.41 vs $0.61. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of Grok 4.20 vs DeepSeek V4 Pro cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $103 on Grok 4.20 and $42.42 on DeepSeek V4 Pro at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Grok 4.20: which is better for agents?

DeepSeek V4 Pro scores higher on output quality (7.2/10 vs 5.8/10), while DeepSeek V4 Pro is the cheaper option. DeepSeek V4 Pro is best for self-hosted setups that want DeepSeek's larger V4 model; Grok 4.20 is best for runs that need more than 1M tokens of context. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between DeepSeek V4 Pro and Grok 4.20 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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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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