DeepSeek V4 Pro vs GPT-4.1 — Side-by-side pricing
Side-by-side API pricing and tokenizer details for DeepSeek V4 Pro (DeepSeek) and GPT-4.1 (OpenAI).
Side-by-side pricing
| Feature | DeepSeek V4 Pro | GPT-4.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | OpenAI |
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $0.435 | $2.00 |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $0.870 | $8.00 |
| Context caching | Yes — 99% off cached tokens | No |
| Batch API discount | Not available | 50% off |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 1M tokens |
| Tokenizer | SentencePiece (Llama) | o200k_base (tiktoken) |
ⓘ GPT-4.1: No longer listed on OpenAI's pricing page. Price could not be re-verified from a vendor source; treat as indicative.
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 V4 Pro
$0.3915
Input: $0.2175 +Output: $0.1740
GPT-4.1
$2.6000
Input: $1.0000 +Output: $1.6000
DeepSeek V4 Pro is 85% cheaper for this workload — saving $2.2085 per month at this volume.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, DeepSeek V4 Pro is cheaper for the typical workload above. At $0.435/1M input and $0.870/1M output tokens, it costs $0.3915 versus $2.6000 for GPT-4.1 — a 85% difference. Costs scale linearly with request volume, so larger workloads amplify this gap.
DeepSeek V4 Pro supports a 1M token context window. GPT-4.1 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 V4 Pro supports context caching (99% off repeated tokens). It does not offer a batch API discount. GPT-4.1 does not support context caching. It offers a 50% Batch API discount.
No, they use different tokenizers. DeepSeek V4 Pro uses the SentencePiece (Llama), while GPT-4.1 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 V4 Pro (DeepSeek): $0.435 input / $0.87 output per 1M tokens. GPT-4.1 (OpenAI): $2 input / $8 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 V4 Pro costs $0.7830 per 1M total tokens and GPT-4.1 costs $6.8000. DeepSeek V4 Pro is 88% cheaper for this pattern. For your exact ratio, paste a real prompt into the calculator above.
DeepSeek V4 Pro has a 1M-token context window — approximately 750K words or ~3K pages of standard text. GPT-4.1 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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