Cost per coding-agent request

Is Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite or Llama 4 Maverick cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Llama 4 Maverick costs 1.2x as much as Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite per request ($0.0095 vs $0.0082 on our measured traffic), because Llama 4 Maverick lists at $0.188 input, $0.05 cached input and $0.653 output per million tokens against $0.25, $0.025 and $1.50 for Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite.

List prices: 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	Flash Lite	Llama 4 Maverick
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0040	$0.0043
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.0099	$0.012
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.022	$0.026
Average request	$0.0082	$0.0095
100 requests	$0.82	$0.95
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.11	$0.11
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$12.53	$15.76

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	Llama 4 Maverick
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	16	10 (estimate)
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	0.5%	0.0%
Output speedmedian	365 tokens/s	44 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	5.0 s	1.1 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, speed on Google; Llama 4 Maverick. 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 Llama 4 Maverick charges $0.05 per million for it against $0.025. 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. The price is OpenRouter's listed rate on October 13, 2026, which can be a third-party host's; Meta's own API may charge differently.

FAQ

Is Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite cheaper than Llama 4 Maverick for coding agents?

Yes, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.82 on Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite and $0.95 on Llama 4 Maverick. A short, median 16-request session costs about $0.11 on both, because the difference sits in longer prompts. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of Llama 4 Maverick vs Flash Lite cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $15.76 on Llama 4 Maverick and $12.53 on Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite vs Llama 4 Maverick: which is better for agents?

Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite scores higher on output quality (4.3/10 vs 3.5/10), while Llama 4 Maverick is the cheaper option. Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite is best for simple, high-volume steps such as classification and extraction; Llama 4 Maverick is best for self-hosted setups built on the Llama ecosystem. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite and Llama 4 Maverick 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

More intelligence
per dollar.

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.

Compliance: Opt-in rules keep a company, team or key on European or US providers
Privacy: We don’t train on your prompts or store them

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