AI Daily Insights No. 71 · October 14, 2026
←Model pricing

DeepSeek vs ERNIE API pricing

Checked against the official price pages on 2026-10-14

In short

At 100M input and 20M output tokens a month, the cheapest model from each is deepseek-flash (about ¥270 a month) and ERNIE-4.5-Turbo (about ¥144 a month). ERNIE's entry model is cheaper; DeepSeek's costs about 1.9 times as much.

The most expensive from each is deepseek-v4-pro (about ¥1,080 a month) and ERNIE-5.1 (about ¥760 a month). Price says nothing about whether the models are equally capable; weigh it with benchmarks and context length.

For your own usage: API cost calculator

All models

Prices are per million tokens: ¥ is CNY, $ is USD; time-of-day pricing is written peak / off-peak. Monthly cost is in CNY and assumes 100M input and 20M output tokens a month, no cache hits and half of calls at peak hours where that applies, cheapest first.

ModelInputCache hitOutputMonthly (CNY)
BaiduERNIE-4.5-Turbo ¥0.8¥0.2¥3.2144
DeepSeekdeepseek-flash ¥2 / 1¥0.04 / 0.02¥8 / 4270
BaiduERNIE-5.1 ¥4—¥18760
DeepSeekdeepseek-v4-pro ¥9 / 4.5¥0.3 / 0.15¥27 / 13.51,080

Price changes at both vendors

  1. 2026-04-24

    DeepSeek V4-Pro launched at a list price of ¥12 input (cache miss) / ¥24 output, with a 75% launch discount (¥3 / ¥6). source

  2. 2026-04-26

    DeepSeek cut cache-hit input prices across the lineup to a tenth of launch levels: ¥0.02 for V4-Flash, ¥0.025 for V4-Pro. source

  3. 2026-05-31

    DeepSeek said V4-Pro would stay permanently at a quarter of its list price after the promotion — ¥3 input / ¥6 output (about $0.435 / $0.87). source

  4. 2026-08-17

    DeepSeek introduced peak/off-peak API pricing: weekday 9:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00 Beijing time are peak; off-peak is half price. V4 Pro output ¥27 peak / ¥13.5 off-peak; V4 Flash output ¥9 / ¥4.5. source · our coverage

  5. 2026-09-10

    DeepSeek launched V4.1 Flash and said it planned to route V4 Pro requests to the new model at Flash prices. source · our coverage

Other comparisons