Cost per coding-agent request

Is GPT-5.5 or MiniMax M2.1 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GPT-5.5 costs 18x as much as MiniMax M2.1 per request ($0.12 vs $0.0065 on our measured traffic), because GPT-5.5 lists at $5 input, $0.50 cached input and $30 output per million tokens against $0.30, $0.03 and $1.20 for MiniMax M2.1, and GPT-5.5 charges more for prompts over 272K tokens.

List prices: OpenAI API pricing, OpenRouter listed price, 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	MiniMax M2.1	GPT-5.5
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0045	$0.081
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.0099	$0.17
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.0065	$0.12
100 requests	$0.65	$11.53
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.076	$1.36
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$7.18	$131

Each logged request priced at the listed rates above 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 205K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	MiniMax M2.1	GPT-5.5
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	21 (estimate)	38
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	n/a	14.6%
Output speedmedian	67 tokens/s	105 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	31 s	71 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: MiniMax-M2.1, speed on MiniMax; 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

MiniMax M2.1's 205K window cannot take 20% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. GPT-5.5 is superseded: GPT-6.1 Sol costs $0.067 per request. The price is OpenRouter's listed rate on October 13, 2026, which can be a third-party host's; MiniMax's own API may charge differently.

FAQ

Is MiniMax M2.1 cheaper than GPT-5.5 for coding agents?

Yes, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.65 on MiniMax M2.1 and $11.53 on GPT-5.5. A median 16-request session costs $0.076 vs $1.36. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 205K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of GPT-5.5 vs MiniMax M2.1 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $131 on GPT-5.5 and $7.18 on MiniMax M2.1 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

GPT-5.5 vs MiniMax M2.1: which is better for agents?

GPT-5.5 scores higher on output quality (7.6/10 vs 5.1/10), while MiniMax M2.1 is the cheaper option. GPT-5.5 is best for existing GPT-5.5 setups on an API key until they move to GPT-6.1 Sol; MiniMax M2.1 is best for short, tool-heavy agent steps on a tight budget. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between GPT-5.5 and MiniMax M2.1 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.