What a coding agent actually costs per month, by model (2026)

Short summary

A fixed coding-agent workload (~90M input + ~25M output tokens/month) costs anywhere from $19/mo (Qwen3.5-Flash) to $1,200/mo (GPT-5.6 Sol)—a 63× spread driven almost entirely by output token pricing. The article argues that output price dominates coding-agent bills, cheap-per-token ≠ cheap-per-task if weaker models loop more, and frontier models may justify premium pricing through fewer iterations. Data sourced from AI Model Watch's daily price tracking.

• •63× cost spread ($19–$1,200/mo) for identical token volume across 15 models
• •Output token pricing is the dominant cost factor for coding agents, not input
• •Cheap-per-token ≠ cheap-per-task; benchmark on your repo, not on leaderboards

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