8 AI Coding Models Ranked by Cost-per-Task
Security Boulevard, Monday, June 8th, 2026
Eight coding models ranked by cost per resolved task, exposing a wide value gap between open and closed models.
Security Boulevard ranks eight AI coding models by cost-per-task, modeling a fixed coding turn of 50,000 input and 12,000 output tokens, pricing it at each model's 2026 token rates, then dividing by published SWE-bench Verified solve rate to account for retries.
The gap is stark: a 1,000-task batch costs roughly $550 on Claude Opus 4.5 versus about $28 on DeepSeek V3.2, a 24x premium for roughly 13 extra points of solve rate.
The analysis concludes the cheapest credible models are open-weight, and that frontier models like Opus 4.5 (about $0.68 per resolved task) are worth the premium only for high-stakes work such as security or migration code where a single correct patch saves heavy review.