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Cost per coding-agent request

Is GPT-5.4 Mini or GPT-5.6 Luna cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GPT-5.4 Mini costs 3.1x as much as GPT-5.6 Luna per request ($0.023 vs $0.0072 on our measured traffic), because GPT-5.4 mini lists at $0.75/$4.50 against Luna's $0.20/$1.20.

List prices: 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 priceGPT-5.6 LunaGPT-5.4 Mini
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached$0.0032$0.012
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached$0.0080$0.030
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached$0.030$0.056
Average request$0.0072$0.023
100 requests$0.72$2.27
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes$0.082$0.30
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days$11.66$34.90

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. Both models are priced on the requests up to 400K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial AnalysisGPT-5.6 LunaGPT-5.4 Mini
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 1003724
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal11.6%2.0%
Output speedmedian123 tokens/s233 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time117 s2.1 min

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: GPT-5.6 Luna (Max), speed on OpenAI; GPT-5.4 mini (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

GPT-5.4 mini's 400K window cannot take 3% of coding-agent requests; the comparison uses requests both can take. GPT-6 Luna is cheaper than either at $0.0041 per request.

FAQ

Is GPT-5.6 Luna cheaper than GPT-5.4 Mini for coding agents?
Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.72 on GPT-5.6 Luna and $2.27 on GPT-5.4 Mini. A median 16-request session costs $0.082 vs $0.30. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 400K tokens that both can take.
How much does a month of GPT-5.4 Mini vs GPT-5.6 Luna cost?
For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $34.90 on GPT-5.4 Mini and $11.66 on GPT-5.6 Luna at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.
GPT-5.4 Mini vs GPT-5.6 Luna: which is better for agents?
GPT-5.6 Luna scores higher on output quality (7.4/10 vs 5.6/10), while GPT-5.6 Luna is the cheaper option. GPT-5.4 Mini is best for short, simple calls in existing GPT-5.4 setups; GPT-5.6 Luna is best for cheap subtasks in existing GPT-5.6 setups. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.
Can I switch between GPT-5.4 Mini and GPT-5.6 Luna 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. 5 votes cast so far.

Output Quality

Correctness and depth of what it produces

67%3 votes33%

Agentic Ability

Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks

0%2 votes100%

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

Related comparisons

Setting it up? GPT-5.6 Luna: model ID, providers and agent config

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