Cost per coding-agent request

Is Grok 4.20 or Qwen3.7 Max cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Grok 4.20 and Qwen3.7 Max cost about the same per request ($0.068 vs $0.063 on our measured traffic).

List prices: xAI models and 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	Qwen3.7 Max	Grok 4.20
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.029	$0.021
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.076	$0.077
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	$0.17	$0.26
Average request	$0.063	$0.068
100 requests	$6.29	$6.84
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.79	$0.61
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$103	$103

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	Qwen3.7 Max	Grok 4.20
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	29	26 (estimate)
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	1.5%	n/a
Output speedmedian	197 tokens/s	95 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	14 s	21 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: Qwen3.7 Max, speed on Alibaba; Grok 4.20 0309 v2 (Reasoning), speed on SpaceXAI. 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

The gap widens on long prompts: under 100K tokens Grok 4.20 costs 1.4x as much per request, over 272K 1.5x. The price is OpenRouter's listed rate on October 13, 2026, which can be a third-party host's; Alibaba's own API may charge differently. Qwen3.7 Max scores as well or better on the benchmarks above, so the cheaper request is not bought with much lower ability.

FAQ

Is Qwen3.7 Max cheaper than Grok 4.20 for coding agents?

Slightly, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $6.29 on Qwen3.7 Max and $6.84 on Grok 4.20. A median 16-request session costs $0.79 vs $0.61. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026).

How much does a month of Grok 4.20 vs Qwen3.7 Max cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $103 on Grok 4.20 and $103 on Qwen3.7 Max at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Grok 4.20 vs Qwen3.7 Max: which is better for agents?

Qwen3.7 Max scores higher on output quality (6.3/10 vs 5.8/10), while Grok 4.20 is the cheaper option. Grok 4.20 is best for runs that need more than 1M tokens of context; Qwen3.7 Max is best for fast, long-context general work in Qwen-based stacks. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Grok 4.20 and Qwen3.7 Max 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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Each step goes to the cheapest model that can do it, on providers we vet for price, uptime and speed, with automatic fallback when one fails.

Compliance: Opt-in rules keep a company, team or key on European or US providers
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