Head-to-Head API Cost Benchmark

DeepSeek-R1 (Reasoner) vs DeepSeek-V3 (Chat): API Price & Latency Comparison

On a standard B2B production workload (5,000 req/day), DeepSeek-V3 (Chat) is 50.2% cheaper ($129.75/mo vs $260.77/mo), while DeepSeek-V3 (Chat) leads in token generation speed (60 tok/s).

Side-by-Side Specification & Billing Matrix

Metric DeepSeek-R1 (Reasoner) (DeepSeek API) DeepSeek-V3 (Chat) (DeepSeek API) Advantage
Standard Input / 1M Tokens $0.550 $0.270 DeepSeek-V3 (Chat)
Cached Input / 1M Tokens $0.140 $0.070 DeepSeek-V3 (Chat)
Output Generation / 1M Tokens $2.19 $1.10 DeepSeek-V3 (Chat)
Intelligence / Benchmark Quality 1315 LMSYS Elo 1282 LMSYS Elo DeepSeek-R1 (Reasoner)
Monthly Spend (5k req/day, 50% cache) $260.77 / mo $129.75 / mo DeepSeek-V3 (Chat) (-50.2%)
Context Window 64,000 tokens 64,000 tokens DeepSeek-R1 (Reasoner)
Output Speed (Throughput) 50 tokens/sec 60 tokens/sec DeepSeek-V3 (Chat)
Batch API Discount -50% (DeepSeek API) -50% (DeepSeek API) DeepSeek API
Primary Workload Fit Budget-friendly chain-of-thought logic, financial verification, logic synthesis High-intelligence general tasks & translation where prompt caching saves 75%+ Workload Dependent
Deploy / Console Access Try DeepSeek-R1 (Reasoner) → Try DeepSeek-V3 (Chat) → Open Full Simulator