What running an AI coding agent actually costs, per day

Per-token API pricing is easy to find and hard to reason about. A rate card tells you the cost of one million tokens; it doesn't tell you what your actual coding-agent workload costs today, this week, or running unattended overnight. We pulled real per-token rates for Qwen3.8-27B, the model NeverMetered serves, across every provider hosting it, plus a couple of the cheapest alternative open models, and ran the numbers at realistic usage levels.

How we calculated this

We used four usage tiers, based on daily token volume and a cache-hit assumption that reflects how coding agents actually work (most of a request is the same file tree and conversation history sent again, which a well-cached provider bills at a steep discount): light (5M tokens/day, 90% cache hit, 3% of volume is output), moderate (15M, 90%/2.5%), heavy (30M, 93%/2%), and very heavy (50M, 95%/2%). Rates below are each provider's own published per-token price, checked directly against provider pricing pages and cross-referenced against a second aggregator; this is a snapshot from mid-September 2026 and these rates move, sometimes within the same month, so verify current pricing before budgeting a project around it.

The same open model, a dozen different prices

Qwen3.8-27B is open-weight, so nothing stops a dozen different companies from hosting it and setting their own price. They do, and the spread is bigger than you'd expect for literally identical model weights.

Cerebras is the outlier worth explaining rather than dismissing: its per-token price is high, but it's also reporting well over 1,000 tokens/second, dramatically faster than any of the other hosts here. That's a real, legitimate tradeoff (speed for money), not a bad deal, it just means "cheapest per token" and "cheapest for your actual workload" aren't always the same question, and neither is "fastest."

Cheaper open models exist, if the model choice is flexible

If you're optimizing purely for token cost and Qwen3.8-27B specifically isn't a requirement, a couple of other open models currently undercut it by a wide margin.

Where the math changes: running something all day

Everything above assumes a workday's worth of usage. The math looks different for an agent that runs continuously, overnight loops, background task queues, a single stream that never stops. NeverMetered's own measured throughput for Qwen3.8-27B is about 42 tokens/second on a single stream. Run that continuously for 24 hours and you're generating roughly 3.6 million output tokens a day, before counting the input side at all.

Add in the input side, agentic coding resends a lot of context every turn, most of it cache-eligible, and a continuous single stream at a typical published Qwen3.8-27B rate lands somewhere around $8-12 a day, roughly $250-350 a month, for one stream that never stops. That's the exact case where a flat, priced-by-parallel-stream plan like NeverMetered's stops being a convenience and starts being the cheaper option outright, since the meter simply isn't running. See current plans for what a stream actually costs on a fixed monthly price instead of a running per-token bill.