DeepSeek V4 Flash vs GPT-4o mini: API pricing compared

Head-to-head on price — the budget tier. On a mixed 10K-input / 2K-output request, GPT-4o mini is about 2.6× cheaper. The full picture below.

List prices side by side

DeepSeek V4 FlashGPT-4o mini
ProviderDeepSeekOpenAI
Input $/MTok$0.44$0.15
Cached input $/MTok$0.014 (97% off)$0.075 (50% off)
Output $/MTok$1.32$0.6
Context window1024K tokens125K tokens
Max output375K tokens16K tokens

DeepSeek V4 Flash: Peak-hour rates (01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, Mon–Fri); all rates are half price off-peak. Cached-input price is DeepSeek’s cache-hit rate.

What each costs in practice

WorkloadInputOutputDeepSeek V4 FlashGPT-4o mini
Short chat message500250$0.0006$0.0002
10-page document + summary7,000500$0.0037$0.0014
Agent / coding session50,00010,000$0.035$0.013
1M tokens in + 1M out1,000,0001,000,000$1.76$0.750

Price your exact token mix on each model's own page: the DeepSeek V4 Flash cost calculator and the GPT-4o mini cost calculator both take custom input/output counts and a requests-per-day figure.

About DeepSeek V4 Flash

DeepSeek V4 Flash is the efficiency-focused member of DeepSeek's V4 series: an MIT-licensed open-weight mixture-of-experts model whose active parameters per token are a small slice of its large total, paired with heavily compressed attention that keeps its million-token context practical. DeepSeek pitches it at fast, intuitive responses for routine work, with switchable thinking modes when a task needs actual deliberation.

It leads a double life by design — the same weights serve DeepSeek's low-cost API and anyone's own infrastructure — which is why it appears in both our cost and VRAM guides.

About GPT-4o mini

GPT-4o mini was OpenAI's workhorse small model of the omni generation — the default budget choice for API developers through the period when GPT-4o led the lineup. It shares the omni design: text and image input, text output, and a context window that was generous for its class at release.

OpenAI maintains it for the many production systems tuned to its exact behaviour, where even small model swaps force re-validation. Its role in new architectures has passed to the GPT-5 family's mini and nano tiers, which offer more context and deeper cache discounts at comparable or lower list prices.

Frequently asked questions

Which is cheaper, DeepSeek V4 Flash or GPT-4o mini?

On a mixed workload (10K input / 2K output tokens per request), GPT-4o mini costs $0.0027 per request versus $0.0070 for DeepSeek V4 Flash — about 2.6× less. List rates: DeepSeek V4 Flash is $0.44/M input and $1.32/M output; GPT-4o mini is $0.15/M input and $0.6/M output.

What does a typical chat message cost on DeepSeek V4 Flash vs GPT-4o mini?

A short chat message (about 500 input and 250 output tokens) costs roughly $0.0006 with DeepSeek V4 Flash and $0.0002 with GPT-4o mini. At 1,000 messages a day that is about $16.50 versus $6.75 per month.

Do DeepSeek V4 Flash and GPT-4o mini have the same context window?

No. DeepSeek V4 Flash accepts up to 1024K tokens of input; GPT-4o mini accepts up to 125K. For workloads built around very large prompts, that difference can matter as much as the per-token rates.

Related

Compare all models at once ·DeepSeek V4 Flash pricing in detail ·GPT-4o mini pricing in detail ·Count tokens in your prompt

Last updated 2026-09-03. Prices verified against each provider's official pricing page; see the methodology.