Cost per coding-agent request

Is GPT-6 Astra or Grok 4.7 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, GPT-6 Astra costs 2.9x as much as Grok 4.7 per request ($0.38 vs $0.13 on our measured traffic), because GPT-6 Astra lists at $10 input, $1 cached input and $50 output per million tokens against $2, $0.50 and $6 for Grok 4.7, 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 4.7	GPT-6 Astra
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.044	$0.15
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.16	$0.39
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.48	$1.52
Average request	$0.13	$0.38
100 requests	$13.16	$37.75
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$1.21	$4.22
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$222	$583

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 500K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	Grok 4.7	GPT-6 Astra
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	46	53
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	25.8%	59.1%
Output speedmedian	86 tokens/s	63 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	101 s	6.0 min

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Grok 4.7 (Xhigh), speed on SpaceXAI; GPT-6 Astra (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

Grok 4.7's 500K window cannot take 1% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. GPT-6 Astra scores clearly higher on the benchmarks above, so it may finish hard tasks in fewer steps.

FAQ

Is Grok 4.7 cheaper than GPT-6 Astra for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $13.16 on Grok 4.7 and $37.75 on GPT-6 Astra. A median 16-request session costs $1.21 vs $4.22. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 500K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of GPT-6 Astra vs Grok 4.7 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $583 on GPT-6 Astra and $222 on Grok 4.7 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

GPT-6 Astra vs Grok 4.7: which is better for agents?

GPT-6 Astra scores higher on output quality (9.3/10 vs 8.6/10), while Grok 4.7 is the cheaper option. GPT-6 Astra is best for the hardest coding and research tasks in OpenAI-based stacks, where cost is secondary; Grok 4.7 is best for output-heavy agent work with prompts under 200K tokens. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between GPT-6 Astra and Grok 4.7 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.