DeepSeek V3 vs Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite — Side-by-side pricing
Side-by-side API pricing and tokenizer details for DeepSeek V3 (DeepSeek) and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite (Google).
Side-by-side pricing
| Feature | DeepSeek V3 | Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite |
|---|---|---|
| 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 3.5 Flash-Lite
$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 3.5 Flash-Lite — a 45% difference. Costs scale linearly with request volume, so larger workloads amplify this gap.
DeepSeek V3 supports a 128K token context window. Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite 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 3.5 Flash-Lite 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 3.5 Flash-Lite 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 3.5 Flash-Lite (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 3.5 Flash-Lite 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 3.5 Flash-Lite 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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