Cost per coding-agent request

Is GPT-5.6 Luna or Llama 4 Maverick cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Llama 4 Maverick costs 1.1x as much as GPT-5.6 Luna per request ($0.0095 vs $0.0084 on our measured traffic), because Llama 4 Maverick lists at $0.188 input, $0.05 cached input and $0.653 output per million tokens against $0.20, $0.02 and $1.20 for GPT-5.6 Luna, and GPT-5.6 Luna 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	GPT-5.6 Luna	Llama 4 Maverick
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0032	$0.0043
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.0080	$0.012
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.034	$0.026
Average request	$0.0084	$0.0095
100 requests	$0.84	$0.95
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.092	$0.11
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$11.83	$15.76

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.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	GPT-5.6 Luna	Llama 4 Maverick
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	37	10 (estimate)
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	11.6%	0.0%
Output speedmedian	123 tokens/s	44 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	117 s	1.1 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: GPT-5.6 Luna (Max), speed on OpenAI; Llama 4 Maverick. 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 Llama 4 Maverick charges $0.05 per million for it against $0.02. GPT-5.6 Luna is superseded: GPT-6 Luna costs $0.0041 per request. The price is OpenRouter's listed rate on October 13, 2026, which can be a third-party host's; Meta's own API may charge differently.

FAQ

Is GPT-5.6 Luna cheaper than Llama 4 Maverick for coding agents?

Yes, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.84 on GPT-5.6 Luna and $0.95 on Llama 4 Maverick. A median 16-request session costs $0.092 vs $0.11. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of Llama 4 Maverick vs GPT-5.6 Luna cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $15.76 on Llama 4 Maverick and $11.83 on GPT-5.6 Luna at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

GPT-5.6 Luna vs Llama 4 Maverick: which is better for agents?

GPT-5.6 Luna scores higher on output quality (7.4/10 vs 3.5/10), while Llama 4 Maverick is the cheaper option. GPT-5.6 Luna is best for cheap subtasks in existing GPT-5.6 setups; Llama 4 Maverick is best for self-hosted setups built on the Llama ecosystem. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between GPT-5.6 Luna and Llama 4 Maverick 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. 1 vote cast so far.

Output Quality

Correctness and depth of what it produces

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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 are included with Standard Compute

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