Cost per coding-agent request

Is Gemini 3.8 Flash or GLM 5.3 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GLM 5.3 costs 1.2x as much as Gemini 3.8 Flash per request ($0.057 vs $0.048 on our measured traffic), because GLM 5.3 lists at $1.40 input, $0.26 cached input and $4.40 output per million tokens against $1.50, $0.15 and $7.50 for Gemini 3.8 Flash.

List prices: Gemini API pricing, Z.AI 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	Gemini 3.8 Flash	GLM 5.3
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.023	$0.026
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.058	$0.070
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.13	$0.16
Average request	$0.048	$0.057
100 requests	$4.83	$5.72
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.65	$0.71
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$73.52	$92.16

Each logged request priced at the vendor’s list rates 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	Gemini 3.8 Flash	GLM 5.3
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	41	45
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	19.7%	41.9%
Output speedmedian	145 tokens/s	69 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	24 s	32 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Gemini 3.8 Flash (High), speed on Google; GLM-5.3 (Max), speed on Z AI. 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 GLM 5.3 charges $0.26 per million for it against $0.15. Gemini 3.8 Flash figures use Google's standard price from January 1, 2027; until then Google charges half. Gemini 3.8 Flash scores close to it on the benchmarks above, so the cheaper request is not bought with much lower ability.

FAQ

Is Gemini 3.8 Flash cheaper than GLM 5.3 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $4.83 on Gemini 3.8 Flash and $5.72 on GLM 5.3. A median 16-request session costs $0.65 vs $0.71. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of GLM 5.3 vs Gemini 3.8 Flash cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $92.16 on GLM 5.3 and $73.52 on Gemini 3.8 Flash at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Gemini 3.8 Flash vs GLM 5.3: which is better for agents?

GLM 5.3 scores higher on output quality (8.4/10 vs 7.9/10), while GLM 5.3 is the cheaper option. Gemini 3.8 Flash is best for high-throughput agents and Gemini CLI users who want speed and big context; GLM 5.3 is best for coding agents that need open weights and strong agentic scores. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Gemini 3.8 Flash and GLM 5.3 in the same agent?

Yes. Model-agnostic agents (Cline, Aider, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, Kilo Code, OpenCode, Continue) let you swap models per task. Many people route hard tasks to the stronger model and routine work to the cheaper one.