AI coding agent costs have two components: the agent's monthly subscription and the LLM's per-token API cost. Understanding both is essential for choosing the right setup.
| Agent | Monthly | Best LLM Included | Total/Mo (Light) | Total/Mo (Heavy) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | $20 | Sonnet 4.6 | $20 | $200 |
| Codex | $20 | GPT-5.5 | $26 | $220 |
| Cursor | $20 | BYOK | $25 | $80 |
| Copilot | $10 | GPT-5.5 | $16 | $70 |
| Aider (free) | $0 | BYOK | $5 | $40 |
| Cline (free) | $0 | BYOK | $5 | $40 |
The lowest-cost setup is Aider + DeepSeek V4 Flash: $0 agent subscription + $0.14/M input tokens. A full day of active coding (1M tokens) costs about $0.50.
Cursor + DeepSeek V4 Flash at $20/mo for the IDE experience, with $0.14/M token LLM costs. Total monthly cost for a professional developer: ~$30-50.
Claude Code Max at $200/mo includes Opus 4.7 access. For teams that need maximum autonomy and reliability, this is the premium option.
Agentic coding uses far more tokens than chat-based coding. An agent might use 50K-200K tokens for a single complex task. At $5/1M input tokens (Opus 4.7), that's $0.25-1.00 per task. With open-source LLMs at $0.14/1M, the same task costs pennies.