LLM Price Watch

DeepSeek V3 vs Grok 4.1: which budget model wins on price?

Grok 4.1 undercuts DeepSeek V3 on both input ($0.20 vs $0.27 per million tokens) and output ($0.50 vs $1.10) — at the identical 128K context window, so there's no size trade-off muddying the comparison. At 200M input/50M output tokens a month, that's $65 for Grok 4.1 versus $109 for DeepSeek V3.

Verified · pricing checked against xAI and DeepSeek's own API documentation
ModelInput /1MOutput /1MContext
Grok 4.1$0.20$0.50128K tokens
DeepSeek V3$0.27$1.10128K tokens

A cleaner comparison than most

Most budget-tier comparisons trade price against context window — cheaper but smaller, or pricier but roomier. Not here: both models sit at exactly 128K tokens, so the entire comparison is just price. Grok 4.1 wins on both input and output, though the gap isn't uniform — it's proportionally larger on output (2.2x) than input (1.35x), meaning the cost difference compounds faster for generation-heavy workloads than for classification or extraction tasks.

Worked example

At 200M input/50M output tokens a month — a realistic mid-volume workload — Grok 4.1 costs $65/month against DeepSeek V3's $109/month, a $44 gap. Scale that to 2B input/500M output tokens and the gap becomes $440 versus $1,090/month. The gap grows faster than the volume because of that output-price asymmetry — worth modeling explicitly if your workload is generation-heavy rather than input-heavy.

How we'd actually decide

On price alone, Grok 4.1 wins cleanly with no context-window trade-off to weigh against it — a rare case where the cheaper option isn't cheaper because it's smaller. That said, at the budget tier, real-world task performance varies more between models than the sub-dollar pricing gap suggests. Run both against a representative sample of your actual workload before deciding on price alone — the cheaper model that gets your task wrong twice as often isn't actually cheaper.

Pricing verified 15 July 2026, non-cached list pricing. Use the calculator with your own volume for an exact estimate.

Frequently asked questions

Is DeepSeek V3 or Grok 4.1 cheaper?

Grok 4.1 is cheaper on both input ($0.20 vs $0.27 per million tokens) and output ($0.50 vs $1.10). At 200M input/50M output tokens a month, that's $65 for Grok 4.1 versus $109 for DeepSeek V3 — Grok comes out roughly 40% cheaper at this volume.

Do DeepSeek V3 and Grok 4.1 have the same context window?

Yes — both offer a 128K-token context window, so this is a clean price comparison without a context-size trade-off complicating it. Unlike most budget-tier comparisons, neither model has a headroom advantage over the other.

Why is the output price gap between these two proportionally larger than the input gap?

DeepSeek V3's output price ($1.10) is a larger multiple of its input price ($0.27, roughly 4x) than Grok 4.1's ($0.50 vs $0.20, 2.5x). That means DeepSeek V3's relative cost disadvantage grows for output-heavy workloads — long-form generation, detailed responses — more than it does for input-heavy tasks like classification or short extraction.

Is price the only thing that should decide between these two at the budget tier?

No — at this tier, actual task performance on your specific workload usually matters more than a sub-cent-per-thousand-tokens difference. Budget-tier models vary more in real-world reasoning quality than their pricing suggests. Test both on a representative sample of your actual task before committing to either based on price alone.