DeepSeek R1 vs Gemini 2.5 Pro — Side-by-side pricing
Side-by-side API pricing and tokenizer details for DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek) and Gemini 2.5 Pro (Google).
Side-by-side pricing
| Feature | DeepSeek R1 | Gemini 2.5 Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | |
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $0.550 | $1.25 |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $2.19 | $10.00 |
| Long-context pricing | Flat rate at any prompt size | Over 200K tokens: $2.50 in / $15.00 out |
| Context caching | No | No |
| Batch API discount | Not available | Not available |
| Context window | 128K tokens | 1M tokens |
| Tokenizer | SentencePiece (Llama) | Gemini tokenizer |
ⓘ 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).
DeepSeek R1
$0.7130
Input: $0.2750 +Output: $0.4380
Gemini 2.5 Pro
$2.6250
Input: $0.6250 +Output: $2.0000
DeepSeek R1 is 73% cheaper for this workload — saving $1.9120 per month at this volume.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, 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 $2.6250 for Gemini 2.5 Pro — a 73% difference. Note that Gemini 2.5 Pro switches to long-context pricing above 200K prompt tokens, so for very long prompts this gap does not scale linearly.
DeepSeek R1 supports a 128K token context window. Gemini 2.5 Pro 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.
DeepSeek R1 does not support context caching. It does not offer a batch API discount. Gemini 2.5 Pro does not support context caching. It does not offer a batch API discount.
No, they use different tokenizers. DeepSeek R1 uses the SentencePiece (Llama), while Gemini 2.5 Pro uses Gemini tokenizer. 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.
DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek): $0.55 input / $2.19 output per 1M tokens. Gemini 2.5 Pro (Google): $1.25 input / $10 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 — DeepSeek R1 costs $1.8620 per 1M total tokens and Gemini 2.5 Pro costs $8.2500. DeepSeek R1 is 77% cheaper for this pattern. For your exact ratio, paste a real prompt into the calculator above.
DeepSeek R1 has a 128K-token context window — approximately 96K words or ~384 pages of standard text. Gemini 2.5 Pro 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.
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