DeepSeek V4 Flash is the cheapest at $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens — 68% cheaper on both input and output. GPT-oss 20B at $0.08/$0.35 offers the lowest input cost of any model.

DeepSeek V4 Flash costs $0.14 input / $0.28 output per million tokens, compared to DeepSeek V4 Pro's $0.435/$0.87. That's 68% cheaper on both input and output. For a typical workload of 10M input + 5M output tokens per month, you'd save approximately $3,900 per year.

DeepSeek V4 Pro offers stronger reasoning and code generation than V4 Flash. However, for most chatbot, classification, and extraction tasks, V4 Flash delivers comparable quality at 68% lower cost. The premium is only justified for complex reasoning tasks that benefit from the larger model.

Yes. Both DeepSeek V4 Pro and V4 Flash use the same API format, so switching within DeepSeek requires only changing the model ID. For other providers like Mistral or GPT-oss, you'll need to update the API endpoint and key, but the core logic stays the same.

DeepSeek V4 Flash offers the best value for code generation at $0.14/$0.28 — 68% cheaper than V4 Pro with comparable quality. For OpenAI ecosystem, GPT-oss 120B at $0.15/$0.60 is a strong alternative. For premium code tasks, GPT-5.3 Codex at $1.75/$14.00 is purpose-built for coding.