DeepSeek V3 vs Gemini 2.5 Flash — Side-by-side pricing
Side-by-side API pricing and tokenizer details for DeepSeek V3 (DeepSeek) and Gemini 2.5 Flash (Google).
Side-by-side pricing
| Feature | DeepSeek V3 | Gemini 2.5 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | |
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $0.270 | $0.300 |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $1.10 | $2.50 |
| Context caching | No | Yes — 90% off cached tokens |
| Batch API discount | Not available | 50% off |
| Context window | 128K tokens | 1M tokens |
| Tokenizer | SentencePiece (Llama) | Gemini tokenizer |
ⓘ 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).
DeepSeek V3
$0.3550
Input: $0.1350 +Output: $0.2200
Gemini 2.5 Flash
$0.6500
Input: $0.1500 +Output: $0.5000
DeepSeek V3 is 45% cheaper for this workload — saving $0.2950 per month at this volume.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, 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 $0.6500 for Gemini 2.5 Flash — a 45% difference. Costs scale linearly with request volume, so larger workloads amplify this gap.
DeepSeek V3 supports a 128K token context window. Gemini 2.5 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.
DeepSeek V3 does not support context caching. It does not offer a batch API discount. Gemini 2.5 Flash supports context caching (90% off repeated tokens). It offers a 50% Batch API discount.
No, they use different tokenizers. DeepSeek V3 uses the SentencePiece (Llama), while Gemini 2.5 Flash 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 V3 (DeepSeek): $0.27 input / $1.1 output per 1M tokens. Gemini 2.5 Flash (Google): $0.3 input / $2.5 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 V3 costs $0.9340 per 1M total tokens and Gemini 2.5 Flash costs $2.0600. DeepSeek V3 is 55% cheaper for this pattern. For your exact ratio, paste a real prompt into the calculator above.
DeepSeek V3 has a 128K-token context window — approximately 96K words or ~384 pages of standard text. Gemini 2.5 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.
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