DeepSeek V4 Flash is the cheapest at $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens — 89% cheaper on input and 89% cheaper on output. For a model with similar reasoning capabilities, DeepSeek V4 Pro at $0.435/$0.87 offers the best balance of quality and cost (65% cheaper).

DeepSeek V4 Flash costs $0.14 input / $0.28 output per million tokens, compared to Grok 4.3's $1.25/$2.50. That's 89% cheaper on both input and output. For a typical workload of 1M input + 500K output tokens per month, you'd save approximately $16,104 per year.

Grok Build 0.1 at $1.00/$2.00 per million tokens is 76% cheaper on input and 80% cheaper on output. It stays in the xAI ecosystem so there's no provider switching, but it has a smaller 256K context window. Good for cost-conscious xAI users who don't need 1M context.

Mostly yes. Many alternative providers offer OpenAI-compatible APIs, so switching often requires just changing the API endpoint and key. DeepSeek, Together (Llama), and several others support the OpenAI API format directly. For providers with different APIs, tools like APIpulse generate migration code automatically.

DeepSeek V4 Pro ($0.435/$0.87) and Llama 4 Scout ($0.18/$0.59) both offer 1M context — the same as Grok 4.3 — at 65-86% lower cost. DeepSeek V4 Flash also has 1M context at just $0.14/$0.28, making it the cheapest 1M-context option available.