Claude Opus 4.8 vs DeepSeek R1 — Side-by-side pricing
Side-by-side API pricing and tokenizer details for Claude Opus 4.8 (Anthropic) and DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek).
Side-by-side pricing
| Feature | Claude Opus 4.8 | DeepSeek R1 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | DeepSeek |
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $5.00 | $0.550 |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $25.00 | $2.19 |
| Context caching | Yes — 90% off cached tokens | No |
| Batch API discount | 50% off | Not available |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 128K tokens |
| Tokenizer | Anthropic tokenizer (Opus 4.7+) | SentencePiece (Llama) |
ⓘ DeepSeek R1: Retired from DeepSeek's own API on 2026-07-24. Figures reflect third-party hosts and are not vendor-published; verify before relying on them.
Real-world cost example
1,000 API requests per month, each with 500 input tokens and 200 output tokens (500K input + 200K output total).
Claude Opus 4.8
$7.5000
Input: $2.5000 +Output: $5.0000
DeepSeek R1
$0.7130
Input: $0.2750 +Output: $0.4380
DeepSeek R1 is 90% cheaper for this workload — saving $6.7870 per month at this volume.
Frequently asked questions
No, DeepSeek R1 is cheaper for the typical workload above. At $0.550/1M input and $2.19/1M output tokens, it costs $0.7130 versus $7.5000 for Claude Opus 4.8 — a 90% difference.
Claude Opus 4.8 supports a 1M token context window. DeepSeek R1 supports a 128K token context window. A larger context window lets you include more text — documents, conversation history, or code — in a single API call.
Claude Opus 4.8 supports context caching (90% off repeated tokens). It offers a 50% Batch API discount. DeepSeek R1 does not support context caching. It does not offer a batch API discount.
No, they use different tokenizers. Claude Opus 4.8 uses the Anthropic tokenizer (Opus 4.7+), while DeepSeek R1 uses SentencePiece (Llama). Different tokenizers split text differently, so the same prompt will produce different token counts on each model — the effective cost difference may be larger or smaller than the per-token price difference alone suggests.
Claude Opus 4.8 (Anthropic): $5 input / $25 output per 1M tokens. DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek): $0.55 input / $2.19 output per 1M tokens. Rates shown before caching or batch discounts.
For an 80% output / 20% input workload — typical for code generation or long-form writing — Claude Opus 4.8 costs $21.0000 per 1M total tokens and DeepSeek R1 costs $1.8620. DeepSeek R1 is 91% cheaper for this pattern. For your exact ratio, paste a real prompt into the calculator above.
Claude Opus 4.8 has a 1M-token context window — approximately 750K words or ~3K pages of standard text. DeepSeek R1 has a 128K-token context window — approximately 96K words or ~384 pages. (Estimates assume ~0.75 words per token.)
Calculate costs for your actual prompt
Paste your prompt into the calculator and get exact token counts using each model's real tokenizer — all in your browser.
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