Cost per coding-agent request

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

For coding agents, GPT-5.4 costs 4.0x as much as GPT-5.4 Mini per request ($0.090 vs $0.023 on our measured traffic), because GPT-5.4 lists at $2.50 input, $0.25 cached input and $15 output per million tokens against $0.75, $0.075 and $4.50 for GPT-5.4 Mini, and GPT-5.4 charges more for prompts over 272K tokens.

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 price	GPT-5.4 Mini	GPT-5.4
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.012	$0.040
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.030	$0.099
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.056	$0.37
Average request	$0.023	$0.090
100 requests	$2.27	$9.03
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.30	$1.02
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$34.90	$146

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 Analysis	GPT-5.4 Mini	GPT-5.4
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	24	39 (estimate)
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	2.0%	n/a
Output speedmedian	233 tokens/s	95 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	2.1 min	3.3 min

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: GPT-5.4 mini (Xhigh), speed on OpenAI; GPT-5.4 (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, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. The gap widens on long prompts: under 100K tokens GPT-5.4 costs 3.3x as much per request, over 272K 6.6x. GPT-5.4 scores clearly higher on the benchmarks above, so it may finish hard tasks in fewer steps.

FAQ

Is GPT-5.4 Mini cheaper than GPT-5.4 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $2.27 on GPT-5.4 Mini and $9.03 on GPT-5.4. A median 16-request session costs $0.30 vs $1.02. 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 vs GPT-5.4 Mini cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $146 on GPT-5.4 and $34.90 on GPT-5.4 Mini at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

GPT-5.4 vs GPT-5.4 Mini: which is better for agents?

GPT-5.4 scores higher on output quality (7.7/10 vs 5.6/10), while GPT-5.4 Mini is the cheaper option. GPT-5.4 is best for existing GPT-5.4 setups that have not moved to the GPT-6 family; GPT-5.4 Mini is best for short, simple calls in existing GPT-5.4 setups. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.4 Mini 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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