DeepSeek-R1 vs o3
DeepSeek-R1 is cheaper than o3 by about 91% on a blended (75% input / 25% output) basis. DeepSeek-R1 charges $0.28 / $0.42 per 1M input/output tokens; o3 charges $2.00 / $8.00.
| Field | DeepSeek-R1 | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| Input $/Mtok | $0.28 | $2.00 |
| Output $/Mtok | $0.42 | $8.00 |
| Cache read $/Mtok | $0.0280 | $0.50 |
| Cache write $/Mtok | – | – |
| Input $/Mchar | 0.0918 | 0.56 |
| Output $/Mchar | 0.14 | 2.25 |
| Context window | 163839 | 200000 |
| Tokenizer | deepseek | o200k |
| Confidence? | aggregator | api |
| Source | litellm | openrouter |
Confidence: official = vendor pricing page · api = OpenRouter per-host · aggregator = community list, may lag · unreviewed = automatic extraction awaiting review. When sources disagree the most authoritative wins. Details: /methodology#confidence
Price history
Same workload, monthly cost
Illustrative monthly cost at 10M tokens/month, split per workload preset. Not a substitute for the calculator, which uses your own volume, cache and batch assumptions.
| Workload | DeepSeek-R1 | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| Coding agent | $2.87 | $23.00 |
| RAG chat | $3.01 | $29.00 |
| Summarisation (batch) | $2.94 | $26.00 |
| Classification | $2.83 | $21.20 |
| Chat assistant | $3.36 | $44.00 |
| Content generation | $3.92 | $68.00 |
Cite this page
DeepSeek-R1 vs o3: $0.28/$0.42 vs $2.00/$8.00 per 1M tokens as of 2026-10-04. Token Barometer by Dejan Strbad, https://tokenbarometer.com, data CC BY 4.0. https://tokenbarometer.com/compare/deepseek_deepseek-reasoner-vs-openai_o3