Cost per coding-agent request

Is Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite or GPT-5.6 Luna cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GPT-5.6 Luna and Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite cost about the same per request ($0.0084 vs $0.0082 on our measured traffic).

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

Run GPT-5.6 Luna and GPT-6 Luna in your agent from $19/month

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Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list price	Flash Lite	GPT-5.6 Luna
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0040	$0.0032
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.0099	$0.0080
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.022	$0.034
Average request	$0.0082	$0.0084
100 requests	$0.82	$0.84
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.11	$0.092
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$12.53	$11.83

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	Flash Lite	GPT-5.6 Luna
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	16	37
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	0.5%	11.6%
Output speedmedian	365 tokens/s	123 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	5.0 s	117 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, speed on Google; GPT-5.6 Luna (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 Luna costs 1.3x as much per request, over 272K 1.6x. GPT-5.6 Luna is superseded: GPT-6 Luna costs $0.0041 per request. 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.

FAQ

Is Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite cheaper than GPT-5.6 Luna for coding agents?

Slightly, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.82 on Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite and $0.84 on GPT-5.6 Luna. A median 16-request session costs $0.11 vs $0.092. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of GPT-5.6 Luna vs Flash Lite cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $11.83 on GPT-5.6 Luna and $12.53 on Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite vs GPT-5.6 Luna: which is better for agents?

GPT-5.6 Luna scores higher on output quality (7.4/10 vs 4.3/10), while GPT-5.6 Luna is the cheaper option. Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite is best for simple, high-volume steps such as classification and extraction; GPT-5.6 Luna is best for cheap subtasks in existing GPT-5.6 setups. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite and GPT-5.6 Luna 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. 3 votes cast so far.

Output Quality

Correctness and depth of what it produces

0%3 votes100%

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 are included with Standard Compute

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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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