Cost per coding-agent request

Is GLM 5.3 or GPT-6 Luna cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GLM 5.3 costs 14x as much as GPT-6 Luna per request ($0.057 vs $0.0041 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 $0.10, $0.01 and $0.50 for GPT-6 Luna, and GPT-6 Luna 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	GPT-6 Luna	GLM 5.3
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0015	$0.026
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.0039	$0.070
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.017	$0.16
Average request	$0.0041	$0.057
100 requests	$0.41	$5.72
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.045	$0.71
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$5.83	$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	GPT-6 Luna	GLM 5.3
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	38	45
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	12.6%	41.9%
Output speedmedian	136 tokens/s	69 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	101 s	32 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: GPT-6 Luna (Max), speed on OpenAI; 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 $0.01. GLM 5.3 scores clearly higher on the benchmarks above, so it may finish hard tasks in fewer steps.

FAQ

Is GPT-6 Luna cheaper than GLM 5.3 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.41 on GPT-6 Luna and $5.72 on GLM 5.3. A median 16-request session costs $0.045 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 GPT-6 Luna cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $92.16 on GLM 5.3 and $5.83 on GPT-6 Luna at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

GLM 5.3 vs GPT-6 Luna: which is better for agents?

GLM 5.3 scores higher on output quality (8.4/10 vs 7.5/10), while GPT-6 Luna is the cheaper option. GLM 5.3 is best for coding agents that need open weights and strong agentic scores; GPT-6 Luna is best for cheap, fast subtasks, routing and subagents in OpenAI-based stacks. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between GLM 5.3 and GPT-6 Luna 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.