DeepSeek V3 vs GPT-5.5 — Side-by-side pricing
Side-by-side API pricing and tokenizer details for DeepSeek V3 (DeepSeek) and GPT-5.5 (OpenAI).
Side-by-side pricing
| Feature | DeepSeek V3 | GPT-5.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | OpenAI |
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $0.270 | $5.00 |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $1.10 | $30.00 |
| Long-context pricing | Flat rate at any prompt size | Over 272K tokens: $10.00 in / $45.00 out |
| Context caching | No | Yes — 90% off cached tokens |
| Batch API discount | Not available | 50% off |
| Context window | 128K tokens | 1.1M tokens |
| Tokenizer | SentencePiece (Llama) | o200k_base (tiktoken) |
ⓘ 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
GPT-5.5
$8.5000
Input: $2.5000 +Output: $6.0000
DeepSeek V3 is 96% cheaper for this workload — saving $8.1450 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 $8.5000 for GPT-5.5 — a 96% difference. Note that GPT-5.5 switches to long-context pricing above 272K prompt tokens, so for very long prompts this gap does not scale linearly.
DeepSeek V3 supports a 128K token context window. GPT-5.5 supports a 1.1M 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. GPT-5.5 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 GPT-5.5 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 V3 (DeepSeek): $0.27 input / $1.1 output per 1M tokens. GPT-5.5 (OpenAI): $5 input / $30 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 GPT-5.5 costs $25.0000. DeepSeek V3 is 96% 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. GPT-5.5 has a 1.1M-token context window — approximately 788K 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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