Cost per coding-agent request

Is DeepSeek V4 Pro or Qwen3.7 Max cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Qwen3.7 Max costs 2.1x as much as DeepSeek V4 Pro per request ($0.063 vs $0.030 on our measured traffic), because Qwen3.7 Max lists at $1.475 input, $0.295 cached input and $4.425 output per million tokens against $1.32, $0.044 and $3.96 for DeepSeek V4 Pro.

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	Qwen3.7 Max
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.014	$0.029
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.036	$0.076
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.084	$0.17
Average request	$0.030	$0.063
100 requests	$3.04	$6.29
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.41	$0.79
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$42.42	$103

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 Pro	Qwen3.7 Max
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	36	29
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	14.1%	1.5%
Output speedmedian	99 tokens/s	197 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	22 s	14 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (Max), speed on DeepSeek; Qwen3.7 Max, speed on Alibaba. 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 Qwen3.7 Max charges $0.295 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. The price is OpenRouter's listed rate on October 13, 2026, which can be a third-party host's; Alibaba's own API may charge differently.

FAQ

Is DeepSeek V4 Pro cheaper than Qwen3.7 Max for coding agents?

Yes, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $3.04 on DeepSeek V4 Pro and $6.29 on Qwen3.7 Max. A median 16-request session costs $0.41 vs $0.79. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of Qwen3.7 Max vs DeepSeek V4 Pro cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $103 on Qwen3.7 Max and $42.42 on DeepSeek V4 Pro at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Qwen3.7 Max: which is better for agents?

DeepSeek V4 Pro scores higher on output quality (7.2/10 vs 6.3/10), while DeepSeek V4 Pro is the cheaper option. DeepSeek V4 Pro is best for self-hosted setups that want DeepSeek's larger V4 model; Qwen3.7 Max is best for fast, long-context general work in Qwen-based stacks. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between DeepSeek V4 Pro and Qwen3.7 Max 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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