Cost per coding-agent request

Is GLM 5.2 or GPT-5.5 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GPT-5.5 costs 3.7x as much as GLM 5.2 per request ($0.21 vs $0.057 on our measured traffic), because GPT-5.5 lists at $5 input, $0.50 cached input and $30 output per million tokens against $1.40, $0.26 and $4.40 for GLM 5.2, and GPT-5.5 charges more for prompts over 272K tokens.

List prices: Z.AI pricing, 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	GLM 5.2	GPT-5.5
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.026	$0.081
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.070	$0.20
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.16	$0.86
Average request	$0.057	$0.21
100 requests	$5.72	$20.99
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.71	$2.30
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$92.16	$296

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	GLM 5.2	GPT-5.5
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	34	38
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	1.0%	14.6%
Output speedmedian	83 tokens/s	105 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	27 s	71 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: GLM-5.2 (Max), speed on Z AI; GPT-5.5 (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

The gap widens on long prompts: under 100K tokens GPT-5.5 costs 3.1x as much per request, over 272K 5.4x. GLM 5.2 is superseded: GLM 5.3 costs $0.057 per request. GPT-5.5 is superseded: GPT-6.1 Sol costs $0.067 per request.

FAQ

Is GLM 5.2 cheaper than GPT-5.5 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $5.72 on GLM 5.2 and $20.99 on GPT-5.5. A median 16-request session costs $0.71 vs $2.30. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of GPT-5.5 vs GLM 5.2 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $296 on GPT-5.5 and $92.16 on GLM 5.2 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

GLM 5.2 vs GPT-5.5: which is better for agents?

GPT-5.5 scores higher on output quality (7.6/10 vs 6.9/10), while GLM 5.2 is the cheaper option. GLM 5.2 is best for existing GLM 5.2 setups until they move to GLM 5.3; GPT-5.5 is best for existing GPT-5.5 setups on an API key until they move to GPT-6.1 Sol. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between GLM 5.2 and GPT-5.5 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.

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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