Prices as of Nov 1, 2026

Which AI model for coding agents?

Agents that read a codebase, edit files and run tests. Long prompts, long answers and many steps per task.

What matters for this task

  • Strong reasoning: a wrong edit costs more than an expensive token
  • A context window large enough for the files the agent reads
  • Caching: agents resend the same files on every step

Typical workload

300 requests/day · 40K in · 3K out · 50% cached

Adjust in the cost calculator

Shortlist

8 models meet the requirements, ranked by monthly cost for this workload.

ModelArena scoreClassContextImagesInput $/1MOutput $/1MMonthly
DeepSeek V4 Pro Lowest cost 1,465 Reasoning 1M — $0.66 $1.98 $176
Grok 4.7 1,441 Flagship 500K ✓ $2.00 $6.00 $612
Claude Sonnet 5.5 1,477 Balanced 1M ✓ $2.00 $10.00 $648
GPT-6.1 Sol 1,481 Balanced 1.05M ✓ $2.00 $10.00 $648
Gemini 4 Argon Promo 1,520 Flagship 1.05M ✓ $2.00 $10.00 $648
Claude Opus 5.5 1,509 Flagship 1M ✓ $4.00 $20.00 $1,296
Claude Fable 5.1 1,504 Frontier 1M ✓ $10.00 $50.00 $3,195
GPT-6 Astra 1,476 Frontier 1.05M ✓ $10.00 $50.00 $3,330

Arena score: LMArena (text, style control), from human votes, published Oct 28, 2026, CC BY 4.0.

Quality tests

Our side-by-side tests for this task are in progress. Until they are published, run 10 to 20 of your own real examples on two or three candidates before you choose.

Independent leaderboards: LMArena · Artificial Analysis

How this list is built: models in the classes suited to the task that meet its hard requirements (image input, context size, open weights), ranked by price. A lower price does not mean better quality.