Cost per coding-agent request

Is Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite or GPT-5.4 Mini cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GPT-5.4 Mini costs 3.0x as much as Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite per request ($0.023 vs $0.0076 on our measured traffic), because every GPT-5.4 Mini rate is 3.0 times Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite's.

List prices: OpenRouter listed price, 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	Flash Lite	GPT-5.4 Mini
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0040	$0.012
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.0099	$0.030
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.019	$0.056
Average request	$0.0076	$0.023
100 requests	$0.76	$2.27
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.099	$0.30
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$11.63	$34.90

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 400K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	Flash Lite	GPT-5.4 Mini
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	16	24
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	0.5%	2.0%
Output speedmedian	365 tokens/s	233 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	5.0 s	2.1 min

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, speed on Google; GPT-5.4 mini (Xhigh), 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

GPT-5.4 Mini's 400K window cannot take 3% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. The price is OpenRouter's listed rate on October 13, 2026, which can be a third-party host's; Google's own API may charge differently. GPT-5.4 Mini scores clearly higher on the benchmarks above, so it may finish hard tasks in fewer steps.

FAQ

Is Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite cheaper than GPT-5.4 Mini for coding agents?

Yes, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.76 on Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite and $2.27 on GPT-5.4 Mini. A median 16-request session costs $0.099 vs $0.30. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 400K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of GPT-5.4 Mini vs Flash Lite cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $34.90 on GPT-5.4 Mini and $11.63 on Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite vs GPT-5.4 Mini: which is better for agents?

GPT-5.4 Mini scores higher on output quality (5.6/10 vs 4.3/10), while Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite is the cheaper option. Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite is best for simple, high-volume steps such as classification and extraction; GPT-5.4 Mini is best for short, simple calls in existing GPT-5.4 setups. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite and GPT-5.4 Mini 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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