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For engineering teams designing LLM integrations, pricing is the ultimate bottleneck. DeepSeek's entry into the API market was a price shockwave. Below is the side-by-side pricing sheet comparing equivalent tiers of DeepSeek and OpenAI.
| Model | Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Cached Input / 1M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Head-to-Head Analysis: The Quality and Latency Differences
When swapping OpenAI APIs with DeepSeek, developers need to weigh the following trade-offs:
- Coding & Reasoning: DeepSeek V4-Pro scores a high **80.6% on SWE-bench Verified**, outperforming OpenAI's GPT-5 ($1.25) at 74.9% and matching Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash. For raw coding capacity, DeepSeek provides frontier performance at low cost.
- Latency: OpenAI's infrastructure offers slightly faster time-to-first-token, but DeepSeek's MoE (Mixture of Experts) architecture scales throughput very quickly, maintaining strong performance.
- Prompt Caching: OpenAI provides a 50% discount on cached inputs, whereas DeepSeek offers a **99% discount** ($0.003625 per million tokens for V4-Pro). For agentic applications where prompts are repeatedly sent, DeepSeek's caching savings are massive.
For more detailed rankings, see our AI Model Rankings or compute your exact monthly cost with the Cost Calculator.