Side-by-side API pricing and tokenizer details for DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek) and o4-mini (OpenAI).
Side-by-side pricing
Feature
DeepSeek R1
o4-mini
Provider
DeepSeek
OpenAI
Input (per 1M tokens)
$0.550
$1.10
Output (per 1M tokens)
$2.19
$4.40
Context caching
No
No
Batch API discount
Not available
50% off
Context window
128K tokens
200K tokens
Tokenizer
SentencePiece (Llama)
o200k_base (tiktoken)
ⓘ 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.
ⓘ o4-mini: Deprecated by OpenAI. API access shuts down 2026-10-23; calls will error after that date. Prices are no longer listed on OpenAI's pricing page and could not be re-verified from a vendor source.
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
o4-mini
$1.4300
Input: $0.5500 +Output: $0.8800
DeepSeek R1 is 50% cheaper for this workload — saving $0.7170 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 $1.4300 for o4-mini — a 50% difference. Costs scale linearly with request volume, so larger workloads amplify this gap.
DeepSeek R1 supports a 128K token context window. o4-mini supports a 200K 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. o4-mini does not support context caching. It offers a 50% Batch API discount.
No, they use different tokenizers. DeepSeek R1 uses the SentencePiece (Llama), while o4-mini uses o200k_base (tiktoken). 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. o4-mini (OpenAI): $1.1 input / $4.4 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 o4-mini costs $3.7400. DeepSeek R1 is 50% 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. o4-mini has a 200K-token context window — approximately 150K words or ~600 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.