Cost per coding-agent request

Is Gemini 3.5 Flash or MiniMax M3 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Gemini 3.5 Flash costs 3.8x as much as MiniMax M3 per request ($0.049 vs $0.013 on our measured traffic), because Gemini 3.5 Flash lists at $1.50 input, $0.15 cached input and $9 output per million tokens against $0.30, $0.06 and $1.20 for MiniMax M3.

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	MiniMax M3	Gemini 3.5 Flash
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0060	$0.024
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.016	$0.060
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.035	$0.13
Average request	$0.013	$0.049
100 requests	$1.29	$4.93
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.16	$0.67
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$20.98	$75.17

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	MiniMax M3	Gemini 3.5 Flash
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	29	33
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	2.0%	6.6%
Output speedmedian	119 tokens/s	197 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	18 s	17 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: MiniMax-M3, speed on MiniMax; Gemini 3.5 Flash (High), speed on Google. 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

Gemini 3.5 Flash is superseded: Gemini 3.8 Flash costs $0.048 per request.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. The price is OpenRouter's listed rate on October 13, 2026, which can be a third-party host's; MiniMax's own API may charge differently.

FAQ

Is MiniMax M3 cheaper than Gemini 3.5 Flash for coding agents?

Yes, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $1.29 on MiniMax M3 and $4.93 on Gemini 3.5 Flash. A median 16-request session costs $0.16 vs $0.67. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of Gemini 3.5 Flash vs MiniMax M3 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $75.17 on Gemini 3.5 Flash and $20.98 on MiniMax M3 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Gemini 3.5 Flash vs MiniMax M3: which is better for agents?

Gemini 3.5 Flash scores higher on output quality (6.8/10 vs 6.3/10), while MiniMax M3 is the cheaper option. Gemini 3.5 Flash is best for existing Gemini 3.5 Flash setups until they move to 3.8 Flash; MiniMax M3 is best for agents that need an open-weight model with a 1M context. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Gemini 3.5 Flash and MiniMax M3 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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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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