DeepSeek R1 vs Llama 4 Scout — Side-by-side pricing
Side-by-side API pricing and tokenizer details for DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek) and Llama 4 Scout (Meta).
Side-by-side pricing
| Feature | DeepSeek R1 | Llama 4 Scout |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | Meta |
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $0.550 | $0.100 |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $2.19 | $0.300 |
| Context caching | No | No |
| Batch API discount | Not available | Not available |
| Context window | 128K tokens | 1M tokens |
| Tokenizer | SentencePiece (Llama) | Heuristic (~chars/4) |
ⓘ 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.
ⓘ Llama 4 Scout: Meta retired the Llama API on 2026-07-06, so there is no vendor price. Figures and context window reflect OpenRouter; other hosts differ.
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
Llama 4 Scout
$0.1100
Input: $0.0500 +Output: $0.0600
Llama 4 Scout is 85% cheaper for this workload — saving $0.6030 per month at this volume.
Frequently asked questions
No, Llama 4 Scout is cheaper for the typical workload above. At $0.100/1M input and $0.300/1M output tokens, it costs $0.1100 versus $0.7130 for DeepSeek R1 — a 85% difference.
DeepSeek R1 supports a 128K token context window. Llama 4 Scout 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. Llama 4 Scout 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 Llama 4 Scout uses Heuristic (~chars/4). 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. Llama 4 Scout (Meta): $0.1 input / $0.3 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 Llama 4 Scout costs $0.2600. Llama 4 Scout is 86% 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. Llama 4 Scout 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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