What a coding-agent model costs, next to how it ranks

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Every model that ranks in an agents category of the Design Arena, priced twice. Read from OpenRouter on 2026-08-22 — 60 models.

List price is not your bill, and here is by how much

A coding agent re-reads its whole context on every step, so about 95.6% of the tokens it sends are cache reads — billed at a fraction of the list input price that every pricing table (including the last version of this one) sorts by.

Repriced at that mix, the list input price overstates what an agent actually pays by a median 6.5× — range 3.4×–7.9× across the 58 of 60 rows that publish a cached-input price.

The ranking barely moves: 9 of the 10 cheapest by list price are still in the cheapest 10 repriced, and the cheapest-to-dearest spread is 53× either way. So list price tells you which model is cheap and lies about what you will pay. The 3.4×–7.9× spread in that multiple is what separates two models whose list prices look identical.

That 95.6% is one person's measurement of one coding agent (8.04B tokens, 2026-05-16), not an industry figure — it is simply the only public measurement we could find. 58 of these rows publish a cached-input price, so the weights ship in the JSON: recompute with your own mix. Cache-write prices are not in the catalog, so that 2.7% of tokens is folded into the cache-miss share, which understates cost by roughly 0.7%.

The 15 cheapest to actually run

$ / 1M at agent mix	$ in list	$ out list	Model	Best agents rank	Context
$0.0283	$0.1875	$0.9375	Gemini 3.7 Flash batch	#3 androidnative	1M
$0.0566	$0.375	$1.875	Gemini 3.6 Flash batch	#6 agenticgamedev	1M
$0.0566	$0.375	$1.875	Gemini 3.7 Flash	#3 androidnative	1M
$0.0672	$0.5321	$1.0642	DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423	#27 godotgamedev	1M
$0.0731	$0.30	$1.20	MiniMax M3	#10 python-pptxslides	1M
$0.0731	$0.30	$1.20	MiniMax M3 batch	#10 python-pptxslides	524K
$0.0769	$0.50	$3.00	Gemini 3 Flash Preview	#9 agenticslides	1M
$0.0918	$0.45	$2.25	Kimi K2.5	#9 godotgamedev	262K
$0.0979	$0.40	$1.75	GLM 4.7	#27 androidnative	204K
$0.1131	$0.75	$3.75	Gemini 3.6 Flash	#6 agenticgamedev	1M
$0.1153	$0.75	$4.50	Gemini 3.5 Flash batch	#3 agenticslides(python-pptx)	1M
$0.1199	$0.5605	$2.36	Kimi K2.6	#2 agentichtmlslides	262K
$0.1218	$0.50	$2.00	GLM 4.6	#13 godotgamedev	204K
$0.1396	$0.875	$7.00	GPT-5.2 batch	#18 godotgamedev	400K
$0.1448	$0.60	$1.92	GLM 5	#16 godotgamedev	204K

All 60 rows: prices.md · JSON · CSV · on the web · on telegra.ph. CC BY 4.0. The weights are in the JSON under agent_token_mix.

One thing this piece could not settle: a rate card is not a routing decision. Which model is your money actually going to this week? Reply with just the name — "still on the free tier" is a real answer and the one I learn most from.