DeepSeek-V3
Open-weightLast verified: June 2026· DeepSeek DeepSeek-V3 pricing
Open-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.
When to choose DeepSeek-V3
The value play: near-frontier general quality at open-weight prices. Pick DeepSeek-V3 over a hosted mid-tier when cost dominates and you have validated quality with evals on your routes; watch data-residency, since the hosted API is offshore.
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.
Cutting your DeepSeek-V3 bill
The headline price isn’t the lever — usage pattern is. The reductions come from routing low-stakes calls to a cheaper tier, caching stable prefixes, batching non-urgent work, and gating it all behind evals so quality holds. The full method — the same one that takes 30–60% out without regressions — is the LLM cost optimization playbook.
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.