Is DeepSeek V3 or GPT-4o mini cheaper?

GPT-4o mini is cheaper than DeepSeek V3 on both input ($0.15 vs $0.27 per million tokens) and output ($0.60 vs $1.10). At a 50M input/15M output monthly workload, that's $16.50/month for GPT-4o mini versus $30/month for DeepSeek V3.

Why would anyone choose DeepSeek V3 if it costs more than GPT-4o mini?

DeepSeek V3 ships with open weights, meaning it can be self-hosted to eliminate per-token API costs at sufficient volume, and some teams prefer that flexibility or avoiding vendor lock-in — GPT-4o mini is closed-weight, API-only.

Do DeepSeek V3 and GPT-4o mini have the same context window?

Yes — both offer a 128K-token context window, so context size isn't a differentiator here. The choice comes down to price, open-vs-closed weights, and task-specific performance.

How does the cost gap change at higher volume?

At 500M input and 150M output tokens a month, DeepSeek V3 costs about $300/month while GPT-4o mini costs about $165/month — the roughly 2x cost ratio holds steady as volume scales.

HEAD-TO-HEAD · BUDGET TIER · VERIFIED 24 JUL 2026

DeepSeek V3 vs GPT-4o mini: which budget model is actually cheaper?

Both sit in the budget tier and both get recommended as "the cheap option," which makes it easy to assume they cost about the same. They don't — and the gap that does exist isn't the most interesting part of this comparison.

Spec	DeepSeek V3	GPT-4o mini
Provider	DeepSeek	OpenAI
Input / 1M tokens	$0.27	$0.15
Output / 1M tokens	$1.10	$0.60
Context window	128K	128K
Weights	Open	Closed

The price gap

GPT-4o mini is cheaper on both sides of the table — about 1.8x cheaper on input and 1.8x cheaper on output. Unlike most of the comparisons on this site, the two models tie on context window at 128K each, so there's no "but it holds more" argument softening the price difference the way there sometimes is elsewhere.

Worked example

At 50M input and 15M output tokens a month — this site's default calculator mix — DeepSeek V3 runs about $30.00/month and GPT-4o mini runs about $16.50/month on standard list pricing. That's a real difference at scale, not a rounding error.

The number the price table doesn't capture

If the only question is cost per token through each provider's own API, GPT-4o mini wins outright. But DeepSeek V3 ships as open-weight, which GPT-4o mini does not. That matters for a narrow but real set of use cases: self-hosting on your own infrastructure to avoid any per-token API cost at high volume, keeping data fully in-house for compliance reasons, or running inference through a third-party host that may price the same open weights differently than DeepSeek's own API. None of that shows up in a per-token price table, which is exactly why it's worth stating plainly here — this comparison is priced on DeepSeek's own hosted API, not a self-hosted or third-party deployment.

Where it actually matters

For a straightforward API call through the provider's own hosted endpoint — most solo-founder use cases — GPT-4o mini's lower per-token price wins with no asterisk. The open-weight angle only changes the answer if self-hosting or a specific data-residency requirement is already on your list of constraints, not a nice-to-have.

Prices verified against each provider's official documentation, 24 July 2026. Use the calculator with your own usage for an exact comparison, or see the full price table for every tracked model.