Cost per coding-agent request

Is GPT-5.6 Sol or Grok 4.3 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GPT-5.6 Sol costs 2.4x as much as Grok 4.3 per request ($0.17 vs $0.068 on our measured traffic), because GPT-5.6 Sol lists at $4 input, $0.40 cached input and $20 output per million tokens against $1.25, $0.20 and $2.50 for Grok 4.3, and both charge more for long prompts.

List prices: OpenAI API pricing, xAI models and 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	Grok 4.3	GPT-5.6 Sol
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.021	$0.062
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.077	$0.16
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.26	$0.68
Average request	$0.068	$0.17
100 requests	$6.84	$16.50
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.61	$1.80
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$103	$233

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	Grok 4.3	GPT-5.6 Sol
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	25	47
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	0.0%	39.9%
Output speedmedian	113 tokens/s	94 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	25 s	2.1 min

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Grok 4.3 (High), speed on SpaceXAI; GPT-5.6 Sol (Max), 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GPT-5.6 Sol is superseded: GPT-6.1 Sol costs $0.067 per request. Grok 4.3 is superseded: Grok 4.7 costs $0.13 per request. GPT-5.6 Sol scores clearly higher on the benchmarks above, so it may finish hard tasks in fewer steps.

FAQ

Is Grok 4.3 cheaper than GPT-5.6 Sol for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $6.84 on Grok 4.3 and $16.50 on GPT-5.6 Sol. A median 16-request session costs $0.61 vs $1.80. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of GPT-5.6 Sol vs Grok 4.3 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $233 on GPT-5.6 Sol and $103 on Grok 4.3 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

GPT-5.6 Sol vs Grok 4.3: which is better for agents?

GPT-5.6 Sol scores higher on output quality (8.6/10 vs 5.7/10), while Grok 4.3 is the cheaper option. GPT-5.6 Sol is best for existing GPT-5.6 Sol setups until they move to GPT-6.1 Sol; Grok 4.3 is best for simple, long-context calls in existing Grok setups. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between GPT-5.6 Sol and Grok 4.3 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

Every model on this page is included with Standard Compute

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