Cost per coding-agent request

Is DeepSeek V4 Pro or Kimi K2.6 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Kimi K2.6 and DeepSeek V4 Pro cost about the same per request ($0.024 vs $0.024 on our measured traffic).

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 Pro	Kimi K2.6
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.014	$0.014
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.036	$0.037
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.024	$0.024
100 requests	$2.35	$2.41
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.30	$0.28
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$28.78	$30.86

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 262K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	DeepSeek V4 Pro	Kimi K2.6
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	36	27
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	14.1%	0.5%
Output speedmedian	99 tokens/s	43 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	22 s	105 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (Max), speed on DeepSeek; Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning), speed on Kimi. 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

Kimi K2.6's 262K window cannot take 12% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. 87% of agent input is read from cache, and Kimi K2.6 charges $0.15 per million for it against $0.044. DeepSeek figures use its peak-hour rates; the rest of the time it costs half, $1.18 per 100 requests.

FAQ

Is DeepSeek V4 Pro cheaper than Kimi K2.6 for coding agents?

Slightly, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $2.35 on DeepSeek V4 Pro and $2.41 on Kimi K2.6. A median 16-request session costs $0.30 vs $0.28. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 262K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of Kimi K2.6 vs DeepSeek V4 Pro cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $30.86 on Kimi K2.6 and $28.78 on DeepSeek V4 Pro at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Kimi K2.6: which is better for agents?

DeepSeek V4 Pro scores higher on output quality (7.2/10 vs 6.0/10), while DeepSeek V4 Pro is the cheaper option. DeepSeek V4 Pro is best for self-hosted setups that want DeepSeek's larger V4 model; Kimi K2.6 is best for general writing and reasoning on an open-weight model. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between DeepSeek V4 Pro and Kimi K2.6 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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