DeepSeek Pricing Calculator (V4 Pro & Flash)

DeepSeek V4 is the price/intelligence floor of the 2026 frontier-model market. V4 Pro at $0.27/$1.10 per 1M tokens and V4 Flash at $0.07/$0.27 sit roughly 40× below OpenAI's flagship pricing while landing within striking distance of GPT-5 on most reasoning benchmarks. Plug your traffic into the cost calculator or see how DeepSeek ranks on the cheapest LLM page.
ModelInput / 1MOutput / 1MContext
DeepSeek V4 Pro (max)
DeepSeek
$0.27$1.101000K
DeepSeek V4 Pro (high)
DeepSeek
$0.27$1.101000K
DeepSeek V4 Flash
DeepSeek
$0.07$0.271000K
Open the full cost calculator →

Why DeepSeek is this cheap

DeepSeek pioneered the MoE (mixture-of-experts) training stack that activates only ~37B parameters per token despite a much larger model. Combined with aggressive batched inference and Chinese cloud GPU costs, the unit economics dominate every Western frontier provider. The catch: data residency and export-control concerns mean some teams can't use the hosted API directly.

When to pick DeepSeek

Use V4 Flash as your default tier for anything that isn't customer-facing legal/medical/financial output. The savings vs GPT-5.5 or Claude Sonnet 4.6 typically pay for a full retry budget — if Flash misses, retry on a frontier model and you still come out 5–10× cheaper overall. See the cost cutting playbook for the cascade routing logic.

Related guides

Compare with Llama pricing, Mistral pricing, or read Cheapest LLM API 2026. See trend data on the LLM pricing history.

Frequently asked questions