❯ Artificial Analysis Estimates: DeepSeek V4-Flash Costs 3 Cents per Task

COST CLIFFIndependent benchmarking outfit Artificial Analysis estimates that a single test run of DeepSeek’s newly released V4-Flash costs about 3 cents on average. On the same basis, Kimi K3 comes to 86 cents, GPT-5.6 Sol to $1.86, and Claude Fable 5 to $3.15 — the most expensive is more than 100x the cheapest, a set of figures Reuters picked up. V4-Flash’s list price is $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens.

METRIC MATTERSPer Artificial Analysis, the key to this calculation isn’t the list price but the fact that it measures “what it costs to actually finish a task”: every token the model consumes to reach an answer is folded into the number. For the past year, enterprises picking models have generally looked only at list prices — a brutal basis for reasoning models. Many models look cheap per token, but once the chain-of-thought runs long, the real bill multiplies several times over. V4-Flash is a 284-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model whose official weights store routed experts directly in MXFP4, with the rest in FP8 or BF16 — effectively baking quantization into training. What it saves at inference isn’t just VRAM. Last week, third parties already released 14 quantized versions, one of them specifically flagged for machines with 128GB of memory.

PRESSURE POINTSThis estimate lands first on how procurement compares prices: for the past year, enterprise selection has revolved around per-million-token quotes; now that number in isolation means little. The first to feel the squeeze are inference providers selling a premium on token price — when the cost to complete the same task can differ by two orders of magnitude, “we’re expensive for a reason” needs something harder than model quality to back it up. DeepSeek’s own gross margin, per its earlier disclosures, is not low; the cost edge comes from engineering, not subsidies, which makes matching its pricing even harder.

▪ SIGNALPer-million-token pricing is losing its reference value; what counts is the total bill for getting a task done.