Direct API pricing comparison
Claude Opus 5 vs DeepSeek V4 Flash
Compare current direct API token prices and estimated monthly workload costs for Claude Opus 5 and DeepSeek V4 Flash.
2direct models
Pricing only.DeepSeek V4 Flash is cheaper in 4 of 4 comparable standard workload presets below. This is a pricing comparison only; it does not rank model quality.
| Model | Input | Cached | Output | Context | Max output | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Claude Opus 5Anthropic · Direct API | $5 | $0.5 | $25 | 1M | 128K | Direct ↗ |
DeepSeek V4 FlashDeepSeek · Direct API | $0.44 | $0.014 | $1.32 | 1M | 384K | Direct ↗ |
Same workload, different API bill
These four presets use 30 active days, standard direct rates, no retries, no reasoning-token add-on, no cache writes, and the cached-input percentage shown in each row.
| Standard workload | Claude Opus 5 | DeepSeek V4 Flash | Lower monthly estimate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chat10,000/day · 2,000 in · 500 out · 25% cached | $6,075 | $398.1 | DeepSeek V4 Flash by $5,676.9 / mo |
| Coding2,000/day · 12,000 in · 1,800 out · 55% cached | $4,518 | $290.66 | DeepSeek V4 Flash by $4,227.34 / mo |
| Agent1,200/day · 32,000 in · 2,500 out · 65% cached | $4,640.4 | $306.69 | DeepSeek V4 Flash by $4,333.71 / mo |
| Documents400/day · 180,000 in · 2,000 out · 15% cached | $9,942 | $844.06 | DeepSeek V4 Flash by $9,097.94 / mo |
The main calculator includes batch mode, long-context rules, retries, reasoning tokens, cache writes, and other model-specific pricing logic that a static comparison cannot fully capture.