How do DeepSeek and Grok free tier limits compare to OpenAI?

DeepSeek offers 10 million free tokens monthly with no time limit, while Grok provides 5 million tokens per month on their free tier. OpenAI discontinued free tier access in 2024, requiring paid accounts from the first API call. Both budget providers reset limits monthly and require credit card verification after initial allocation.

Can I use DeepSeek or Grok as drop-in replacements for GPT-4?

Yes, both DeepSeek V3 and Grok 4.1 support OpenAI-compatible API endpoints, allowing direct replacement in most applications by changing the base URL and API key. However, function calling formats differ slightly, and context window handling varies—DeepSeek supports 128K tokens while Grok extends to 200K tokens compared to GPT-4's standard 128K window.

Do DeepSeek and Grok charge separately for cached tokens?

DeepSeek charges $0.07 per million cached input tokens (74% discount from standard input pricing), while Grok currently does not offer prompt caching discounts at all. This makes DeepSeek significantly cheaper for repeated queries with identical context, such as RAG applications or multi-turn conversations with long system prompts that remain constant.

Which budget model is faster for real-time applications?

Grok 4.1 averages 85 tokens per second output speed with 1.2-second time-to-first-token, while DeepSeek V3 produces 62 tokens per second with 1.8-second initial latency. For chatbots and streaming applications where response speed matters, Grok delivers noticeably faster user experience despite costing nearly double DeepSeek's per-token rate.

PROVIDER GUIDE · VERIFIED 15 JUL 2026

What are DeepSeek and Grok API pricing, and why are they considered budget alternatives?

DeepSeek and Grok APIs are considered budget alternatives because they cost significantly less than OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models—DeepSeek V3 starts at $0.27 per million input tokens while Grok 4.1 begins at $0.50, compared to $2.50-$15 for major providers. Both deliver competitive performance for most production workloads at 5-10x lower cost.

Every price comparison on this site eventually surfaces the same question: why not just always use the cheapest option? DeepSeek V3 and Grok 4.1 are the two models in our table that don't come from the "big three" (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) — and both undercut the big three's budget tier on at least one dimension. Here's what that actually means in practice.

Model	Input /1M	Output /1M	Context
Grok 4.1	$0.20	$0.50	128K
DeepSeek V3	$0.27	$1.10	128K

Grok 4.1 undercuts even the cheapest big-three models

At $0.20/$0.50 per million tokens, Grok 4.1 is priced below GPT-4o mini and Gemini 2.5 Flash ($0.15/$0.60 each) on output specifically, and competitive on input. For pure high-volume, low-complexity workloads — the same classification and routing tasks where budget-tier models generally excel — Grok 4.1 is worth benchmarking directly against the two budget leaders from OpenAI and Google before you default to a name you recognize.

DeepSeek V3 is not actually the cheapest option in this table

This is worth stating plainly because DeepSeek's reputation as "the cheap one" gets repeated often enough that it's easy to assume it's automatically the best-value pick. At $0.27/$1.10, it's actually more expensive than GPT-4o mini, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Grok 4.1 on both input and output. It remains a genuinely low-cost option in absolute terms — just not the cheapest one we track, which matters if cost is the specific reason you're considering it.

What "budget alternative" actually trades off

Price alone doesn't tell you whether a model is right for your task. Context window (128K for both, versus up to 1M-2M for Gemini's tiers) limits how much you can hand the model in a single call. Ecosystem maturity — tooling, documentation, community troubleshooting — is generally deeper for the big three simply because more people have been building on them longer. Neither of these is automatically disqualifying, but both are real considerations beyond the per-token rate, especially for a production system you'll need to maintain and debug.

When these two make sense

Grok 4.1 — high-volume, simple tasks where you've already benchmarked it against GPT-4o mini and Gemini 2.5 Flash for your specific use case and it performs comparably.
DeepSeek V3 — situations where its specific reasoning approach or open-weight availability matters to your architecture, not purely as a cost play, since it isn't actually the cheapest option here.
Either one — as a secondary provider for redundancy, so a single provider's outage or rate limit doesn't take down your whole system.

Prices verified against api-docs.deepseek.com and docs.x.ai, 15 July 2026. See full methodology. Use the calculator to compare both against every other tracked provider for your own usage.