Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek V4 Flash — Side-by-side pricing
Side-by-side API pricing and tokenizer details for Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) and DeepSeek V4 Flash (DeepSeek).
Side-by-side pricing
| Feature | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek V4 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | DeepSeek |
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $3.00 | $0.140 |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $15.00 | $0.280 |
| Context caching | Yes — 90% off cached tokens | Yes — 98% off cached tokens |
| Batch API discount | 50% off | Not available |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 1M tokens |
| Tokenizer | Anthropic tokenizer | SentencePiece (Llama) |
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 V4 Flash
$0.1260
Input: $0.0700 +Output: $0.0560
DeepSeek V4 Flash is 97% cheaper for this workload — saving $4.3740 per month at this volume.
Frequently asked questions
No, DeepSeek V4 Flash is cheaper for the typical workload above. At $0.140/1M input and $0.280/1M output tokens, it costs $0.1260 versus $4.5000 for Claude Sonnet 4.6 — a 97% difference.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 supports a 1M token context window. DeepSeek V4 Flash supports a 1M 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 V4 Flash supports context caching (98% off repeated tokens). It does not offer a batch API discount.
No, they use different tokenizers. Claude Sonnet 4.6 uses the Anthropic tokenizer, while DeepSeek V4 Flash 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 V4 Flash (DeepSeek): $0.14 input / $0.28 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 V4 Flash costs $0.2520. DeepSeek V4 Flash is 98% 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 V4 Flash has a 1M-token context window — approximately 750K words or ~3K 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.
Open calculator