DeepSeek-V3
Open-weightOpen-weight model with aggressive pricing. Off-peak discounts may apply — confirm with the provider.
- Input / 1M
- $0.27
- Output / 1M
- $1.10
- Context
- 128K tokens
- Provider
- DeepSeek
Pricing verified June 2026. Prices change frequently. Always confirm against the provider’s official pricing page before relying on these figures for budgeting. Official pricing →
What DeepSeek-V3 is best for
Very low-cost general work where an open-weight model meets your quality bar.
Use it for cost-sensitive or data-sensitive workloads where an open-weight model clears your quality bar, including self-hosting. Avoid it for work that needs top-tier frontier quality, unless you’ve validated the model holds up with evals.
DeepSeek-V3 cost by volume
Estimated monthly cost at three realistic volumes, at $0.27 input / $1.10 output per million tokens.
| Scenario | Input / mo | Output / mo | Est. cost / mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prototype | 2M | 0.5M | $1 |
| Growing product | 50M | 10M | $25 |
| At scale | 500M | 100M | $245 |
Plug in your own numbers with the cost calculator.
How to cut your DeepSeek-V3 bill
The headline price isn’t the lever — your usage pattern is. The biggest reductions come from how you route and structure requests, not from switching models alone:
- Route low-stakes calls to a cheaper tier and keep DeepSeek-V3 on the routes where its strengths matter.
- Cache large stable prompt prefixes so repeated context bills at a fraction of the price.
- Batch non-urgent work, and trim oversized context by retrieving instead of stuffing.
- Add fallback chains so a timeout doesn’t trigger an expensive retry.
Do it behind evals so quality holds — that combination is how teams cut 30–60% without regressions.
Context window: 128K tokens
DeepSeek-V3’s context window bounds how much it can consider at once — system prompt, history, retrieved docs, and the response all draw from those 128K tokens. A larger window enables whole-codebase reasoning and long documents, but using more of it costs more per request — so retrieval and caching still matter even when the window is large.
Cheaper alternatives to DeepSeek-V3
By blended cost (3:1 input:output). The right swap depends on whether quality holds on your routes — always validate with evals.
Frequently asked questions
How much does DeepSeek-V3 cost?
DeepSeek-V3 costs $0.27 per million input tokens and $1.10 per million output tokens. A workload of 50M input and 10M output tokens per month would cost about $24.5. Confirm current pricing with the provider.
What is DeepSeek-V3's context window?
DeepSeek-V3 has a 128K-token context window. Open-weight model with aggressive pricing. Off-peak discounts may apply — confirm with the provider.
Is DeepSeek-V3 the right model for my workload?
Very low-cost general work where an open-weight model meets your quality bar. The cheapest correct model is workload-specific — route low-stakes calls to a cheaper tier and reserve DeepSeek-V3 for work where its strengths matter, validated by evals.