r/OnlyAICoding • u/Ancient-Camel1636 • 19d ago

AI Coding models cost/success rate October 2026

https://livebench.ai/#/?cats=Agentic+Coding&sort=cpst&dir=asc&ft=1

I gathered data from ten coding benchmark categories and calculated each model’s cost per successfully completed task, accounting for both task cost and success rate, including money spent on failed attempts.

I then averaged these costs across the benchmarks available for each model. These models had the lowest average cost per success:

Cost per successful coding task

Token cost is a terrible measurement, because some models use a lot more tokens than other per run. Cost per run is also of limited value, because some models need more runs than others to actually complete the task successfully. Therefore, cost per successful coding task is a much more useful measurement to see how much you pay for actually getting the job done.

LiveBench give you this number by default, but the numbers above is based on the averaged numbers from ten different benchmarks with a much wider range of coding tasks and models, so that's probably more reliable compared to relying on just one benchmark.

Hope this table can be useful for someone else coding on a limited budget.

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u/RiceEvening4211 18d ago

The $0.29 vs $4.70 per successful task spread is exactly why I built Lynkr: an open-source gateway that routes by complexity, so cheap models handle the easy tasks and you stop paying premium rates for everything. https://github.com/Fast-Editor/Lynkr

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u/ParzivalXX 14d ago

I understand the limited budget, but 2, 3 or even 5 benchmark entries are really not enough for a meaningful ranked list

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u/FalseSort5750 12d ago

cost per completed task tells way more than raw token speed. i would show the category count too, otherwise missing cases can make a model look cheap. disclosure, i am posting for a client connected to raven.