DeepSeek pricing
DeepSeek Flash pricing
DeepSeek Flash bills per million tokens, metered separately for input and output. The current rates are below, along with the parts of the bill a per-token estimate leaves out.
DeepSeek Flash rates in full
All figures are USD per million tokens, taken from DeepSeek’s own pricing documentation. The API model identifier is deepseek-flash.
| Per million tokens | Off-peak (most hours) | Peak (01:00–04:00 & 06:00–10:00 UTC, Mon–Fri) |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.15 | $0.30 |
| Cached input read | $0.0030 | $0.0060 |
| Output | $0.60 | $1.20 |
Context window: 1M tokens, with up to 384K tokens of output per request.
What the rate table does not tell you
Flash is model version DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash; the legacy names deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp still route to it at the same price.
Peak hours (01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, Monday to Friday) bill at exactly double the off-peak rate on every line.
Priced about 23% of DeepSeek V4 Pro on off-peak input, and about 30% on off-peak output.
A worked monthly example
Take 500,000 calls in a month at 3,000 input tokens and 400 output tokens each. That is 1.5 billion input tokens against 200 million output tokens, so input is 88% of the token volume.
| Line | Tokens | Rate | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input | 1,500M | $0.15 | $225 |
| Output | 200M | $0.60 | $120 |
| Total | 1,700M | $345 |
Output is 12% of the tokens and 35% of the bill. That inversion is why prompt trimming so often fails to move the invoice, and it is the single most common reason a forecast built on DeepSeek Flash comes in under the real number.
How this page stays current
The rate on this page was read off DeepSeek’s published pricing and recorded with the date it was checked, September 16, 2026. The date changes only when someone checks again, not on each deploy. This model is not matched to the live model catalog, so the rate rests on the publisher documentation check alone.
Frequently asked questions
How much does the DeepSeek Flash API cost?
DeepSeek Flash is billed per million tokens, metered separately for input and output. As of September 16, 2026 the rate is $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, with cached input read at $0.0030.
Why is my DeepSeek Flash bill higher than the per-token estimate?
Most estimates multiply expected tokens by the input rate and stop there. Output is priced at $0.60 against $0.15 for input, so responses usually dominate the bill even when prompts look larger. Reasoning tokens bill as output. Retries and agent fan-out pay full input cost for calls that produced nothing. And a cache that gets written but never read is pure overhead rather than a saving.
What is the cheapest way to run DeepSeek Flash?
Caching a stable prefix takes repeat input to $0.0030, 2% of the standard rate, and pays for itself once the cached content is read more often than it is written. The larger lever is usually routing: sending the requests that do not need this tier to a cheaper model, and capping spend per customer before the call goes out.
How do I track DeepSeek Flash spend per customer or per feature?
Provider reports group usage by model, project or API key. Your application supplies the customer and workflow context needed to see cost per account. That means passing the customer, team or agent with each request from your server and recording the resolved cost against it. Spendline does this for supported requests routed through it, and checks configured budgets before forwarding them. Actual response cost can differ from the pre-call estimate.
See cost per customer, not just per token
A rate card tells you what a token costs. It does not tell you which customer, team or agent spent it. Spendline records attributed cost for supported requests routed through it and checks configured budgets before forwarding them.
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