DeepSeek V4.1 Flash pricing: budget-tier, with two asterisks

Where it actually lands

On the history-carrying chatbot above, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash runs $47/mo — rank 7 of 18 in our catalog on that workload. GPT-5.4 costs roughly 10× as much for the same work, so this is still firmly a budget-tier price. It is not, however, the cheapest row: Amazon Nova Lite, GPT-OSS 20B (Groq), Llama 3 8B Lite, Mistral Small 4, GPT-OSS 120B (Groq), Claude Haiku 5.5 all come in below it. At $0.3/1M input and $1.2/1M output, the interesting question is no longer the sticker price — it’s the caching behaviour and the data policy.

A 98% cached-read discount — the steepest here

Cached input bills at $0.006/1M, roughly 98% below standard input. Every other model in the catalog discounts cached reads by about 90%. On a workload with a large stable prefix — a long system prompt, a reused document, a growing transcript — the cached portion of your bill rounds to nothing, and that discount is now doing more of the work than the base rate is.

The 1000K context window compounds that: long prompts are both cheap to send and nearly free to re-send.

The “batch” rate is a clock, not an endpoint

DeepSeek has no batch API. What it has is off-peak pricing: every token is discounted 50% outside 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, Monday to Friday — weekends and Chinese public holidays are off-peak all day. We model that in the batch fields because the arithmetic is identical to a 50% batch tier, but the mechanism is different in a way that matters — you get the discount by scheduling work into a window, not by submitting to a queue and waiting. If your load is already off-peak-heavy, you are paying the discounted rate on real-time calls, which no batch tier gives you.

The caveat you have to price in

DeepSeek is a China-based provider, and for many teams that is a decision made outside the cost model entirely — by a procurement policy, a customer contract, a regulator, or a data residency commitment. If you handle personal data, regulated data, or anything a customer agreement covers, review the data policy before the price, because no per-token discount survives a compliance objection.

Where it fits cleanly: internal tooling, non-sensitive bulk processing, prototyping, and offline pipelines over public or synthetic data. Where it usually doesn’t: anything customer-facing under a data-processing agreement that doesn’t list it.

Endpoint naming

The current id is deepseek-flash. Two older names still resolve to it: deepseek-v4-flash, which became an alias when V4 Flash was retired in October 2026, and deepseek-chat / deepseek-reasoner, retired on 2026-07-24. Aliased calls are served by V4.1 Flash and billed at the rate above, so an older integration keeps working — but it is no longer running the model its name says.