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Capital & Compute
Tool· Rates as of June 2026

AI Coding Agent Cost Calculator

The monthly plan price is a floor. What you actually pay is set per task, by how many tokens the agent burns. Pick a model, set the task shape, and see the modeled cost per task, your monthly spend, and which model is genuinely cheapest for the work.

How much does an AI coding agent cost per task?

Most real tasks land between about $0.10 and $5 per task in 2026, set by how many tokens the agent burns rather than the monthly plan price. A modeled multi-file change on Claude Sonnet 4.6 runs about $1.46: a trivial one-file edit costs cents, the same task on a cheap model like DeepSeek V4 is around a dime, and a premium model or an agent that loops on a hard problem can run several dollars.

Cost-per-task calculator

Modeled estimate
Cost per task
$1.46
Claude Sonnet 4.6
At 3 tasks/day
$96.03/mo
22 working days
Where the money goes
  • Cache reads: $0.405 (28%)
  • Fresh input: $0.450 (31%)
  • Output: $0.600 (41%)

A flat $10/mo plan (GitHub Copilot Pro) pays for itself above about 6.9 tasks/month at this cost-per-task. You are modeling 66. Below the break-even, pure usage billing is cheaper; above it, the subscription is.

Every model on this exact task, cheapest first
ModelSticker (in/out)Cost/task
DeepSeek V4 $0.435/$0.87$0.105
Gemini 3 Flash $0.5/$3$0.262
Claude Haiku 4.5 $1/$5$0.485
Kimi K2.7 Code $0.95/$4$0.559
GLM-5.2 $1.4/$4.4$0.737
Gemini 3.5 Flash $1.5/$9$0.787
Qwen3.7 Max $2.5/$7.5$1.01
Gemini 3.1 Pro $2/$12$1.05
Claude Sonnet 4.6 selected$3/$15$1.46
Claude Opus 4.8 $5/$25$2.42
GPT-5.5 $5/$30$2.63
Claude Fable 5 $10/$50$4.85

Modeled from published per-token API rates and stated token assumptions, not a benchmark. Real cost varies with your codebase and how tightly you scope each request; the same task can swing by an order of magnitude between runs.

How the model works

The calculator turns published per-token API rates into a cost per task using one transparent formula. For a chosen model, the cost of a single task is the sum of three lines:

  • Cache reads: the repeated context an agent re-reads each turn (system prompt, files it has already seen), billed at roughly a tenth of the fresh input rate.
  • Fresh input: the new tokens the model has not seen before, at the full input rate.
  • Output: the tokens the model generates, at the output rate.

That per-run total is multiplied by the number of loops, retries, or parallel agent instances. Monthly spend is cost per task times your tasks per day across 22 working days. Every per-token rate is read from the provider's official API pricing page and dated; see the AI coding plan pricing comparison for the subscription side of the ledger, and the AI model release tracker for release dates and what is coming next. Weighing a flat plan against pay-as-you-go? Thesubscription vs API calculator turns this per-task cost into your break-even point.

Why the cheapest sticker is often not the cheapest task

Rank the models by cost per task and the order rarely matches the pricing page. A model with a low per-token rate can still cost more to finish a job if it generates more output or burns more reasoning tokens. A 2026 Microsoft Research preprint found this price reversal in 32% of model pairs, the cheaper-listed model costing more to complete the same work. The mechanism, and what to measure instead, is the subject ofthe price reversal phenomenon. For the per-task math worked through end to end on one agent, seewhat Claude Code really costs per task. To put two or three specific models head to head on the same task, use theAI model comparison.

Treat the number as a range, not a point

These figures are modeled from published prices and stated assumptions. They are not a benchmark, and they are not your bill. The same task run twice on the same model can vary in cost by nearly an order of magnitude, because how long a model reasons is partly random. Use the calculator to size the order of magnitude and compare models on the same task, then plan against the expensive tail rather than the average.

Frequently asked questions

How much does an AI coding agent cost per task?

Most real tasks land between about $0.10 and $5 per task in 2026, set by how many tokens the agent burns rather than the monthly plan price. A modeled multi-file change on Claude Sonnet 4.6 runs about $1.46: a trivial one-file edit costs cents, the same task on a cheap model like DeepSeek V4 is around a dime, and a premium model or an agent that loops on a hard problem can run several dollars.

Why is cost per task more useful than the monthly price?

The subscription is only a floor. What you actually pay is set by token consumption, which swings by more than an order of magnitude depending on the task and the model. Budgeting off the plan page reads the wrong line on the invoice; cost per task is the unit that predicts the real bill.

Which AI model is cheapest per coding task?

It depends on the task shape, and the cheapest sticker price is often not the cheapest to finish the work. Output-heavy or long-thinking models can cost more per task despite a low per-token rate. On a modeled multi-file change across the twelve models here, DeepSeek V4, Google Gemini 3 Flash, and Anthropic Claude Haiku 4.5 come out cheapest, while Claude Fable 5 is the priciest; on other profiles the ranking shifts, which is the whole point of modeling it.

What drives the cost of an AI coding task?

Three things: input tokens (mostly cache reads in a long session, billed at roughly a tenth of fresh input), output tokens, and how many times the agent loops or retries. Loop count and parallel agent instances multiply the bill fastest: agent teams use roughly 7x the tokens of a single session.

Sources

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