DeepSeek vs Qwen API pricing
Checked against the official price pages on 2026-10-08
In short
At 100M input and 20M output tokens a month, the cheapest model from each is deepseek-flash (about ¥270 a month) and qwen3.7-plus (about ¥360 a month). DeepSeek's entry model is cheaper; Qwen's costs about 1.3 times as much.
The most expensive from each is deepseek-v4-pro (about ¥1,080 a month) and qwen3.8-max (about ¥1,920 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
CNY per million tokens; time-of-day pricing is written peak / off-peak. Monthly cost assumes 100M input and 20M output tokens a month, no cache hits and half of calls at peak hours where that applies, cheapest first.
| Model | Input | Cache hit | Output | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeekdeepseek-flash | 2 / 1 | 0.04 / 0.02 | 8 / 4 | 270 |
| Qwenqwen3.7-plus | 2 | — | 8 | 360 |
| DeepSeekdeepseek-v4-pro | 9 / 4.5 | 0.3 / 0.15 | 27 / 13.5 | 1,080 |
| Qwenqwen3.8-max | 12 | — | 36 | 1,920 |
Price changes at both vendors
DeepSeek V4-Pro launched at a list price of ¥12 input (cache miss) / ¥24 output, with a 75% launch discount (¥3 / ¥6). source
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
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
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
DeepSeek launched V4.1 Flash and said it planned to route V4 Pro requests to the new model at Flash prices. source · our coverage