Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek V3 — Side-by-side pricing
Side-by-side API pricing and tokenizer details for Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) and DeepSeek V3 (DeepSeek).
Side-by-side pricing
| Feature | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek V3 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | DeepSeek |
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $3.00 | $0.270 |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $15.00 | $1.10 |
| Context caching | Yes — 90% off cached tokens | No |
| Batch API discount | 50% off | Not available |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 128K tokens |
| Tokenizer | Anthropic tokenizer | SentencePiece (Llama) |
ⓘ DeepSeek V3: 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 Sonnet 4.6
$4.5000
Input: $1.5000 +Output: $3.0000
DeepSeek V3
$0.3550
Input: $0.1350 +Output: $0.2200
DeepSeek V3 is 92% cheaper for this workload — saving $4.1450 per month at this volume.
Frequently asked questions
No, DeepSeek V3 is cheaper for the typical workload above. At $0.270/1M input and $1.10/1M output tokens, it costs $0.3550 versus $4.5000 for Claude Sonnet 4.6 — a 92% difference.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 supports a 1M token context window. DeepSeek V3 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 Sonnet 4.6 supports context caching (90% off repeated tokens). It offers a 50% Batch API discount. DeepSeek V3 does not support context caching. It does not offer a batch API discount.
No, they use different tokenizers. Claude Sonnet 4.6 uses the Anthropic tokenizer, while DeepSeek V3 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 Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic): $3 input / $15 output per 1M tokens. DeepSeek V3 (DeepSeek): $0.27 input / $1.1 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 Sonnet 4.6 costs $12.6000 per 1M total tokens and DeepSeek V3 costs $0.9340. DeepSeek V3 is 93% cheaper for this pattern. For your exact ratio, paste a real prompt into the calculator above.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a 1M-token context window — approximately 750K words or ~3K pages of standard text. DeepSeek V3 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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