HEAD-TO-HEAD · FLAGSHIP VS. BUDGET · VERIFIED 24 SEP 2026

Grok 4.7 vs DeepSeek V3: which is actually cheaper?

DeepSeek V3 costs roughly 6-12x less than Grok 4.7 per million tokens, but the two aren't really competing for the same job — Grok 4.7 is xAI's flagship for hard, long-running coding and reasoning work, while DeepSeek V3 is priced and positioned as the budget option. The real question isn't which is cheaper, it's whether your task needs what the premium buys.

Spec	Grok 4.7	DeepSeek V3
Input / 1M tokens	$1.60	$0.27
Output / 1M tokens	$4.80	$0.41
Context window	500K	128K

The output price gap

Output tokens are where the gap really shows: Grok 4.7 charges $4.80 per million against DeepSeek V3's $0.41 — an 11.7x difference. For workloads that generate a lot of output relative to input (long code files, detailed reports, multi-step agent reasoning traces), this is the number that actually drives your bill, more than the smaller 5.9x gap on input.

Context window

Grok 4.7's 500K context window is close to 4x DeepSeek V3's 128K. If you're feeding in a large codebase, a long document, or a lot of conversation history, DeepSeek V3 will truncate or force you to chunk the input well before Grok 4.7 does. For short, focused tasks this rarely matters; for large-context agentic work, it can be the deciding factor regardless of price.

Worked example

At 100M input and 30M output tokens in a month — a realistic mid-volume workload — Grok 4.7 comes to roughly $304/month (100 × $1.60 + 30 × $4.80), while DeepSeek V3 comes to about $39.30/month (100 × $0.27 + 30 × $0.41) for the identical token volume. That's a real difference of over $260/month at this volume, purely from the model choice.

Prices verified directly against OpenRouter's live pricing feed on 24 September 2026. Use the calculator with your own usage for an exact comparison, or see the full price table for every tracked model.

Frequently asked questions

Is Grok 4.7 or DeepSeek V3 cheaper?

DeepSeek V3 is dramatically cheaper on both sides of the ledger — about 5.9x cheaper on input tokens and 11.7x cheaper on output tokens than Grok 4.7. Grok 4.7 is xAI's flagship model for hard, long-running coding and knowledge work, while DeepSeek V3 is priced as a budget-tier option. This isn't two flagship models at different prices — it's a flagship compared against a budget model, and the price gap reflects that.

What happened to Grok 4.1?

Grok 4.1 has been superseded on OpenRouter — xAI has since shipped 4.3, 4.5, 4.6, and now 4.7, released 21 September 2026 as the current flagship. "grok" with no version number now aliases to 4.7 by default, so this comparison uses the model new users actually get today.

How much context window does each model have?

Grok 4.7 offers a 500K token context window, well ahead of DeepSeek V3's 128K. For work that involves feeding in large codebases or long documents, Grok 4.7's larger window matters more than the price gap for some workloads — though DeepSeek V3's 128K is still enough for most single-file or moderate-length tasks.

Which one should I actually use?

If cost per token is the deciding factor and your task doesn't need Grok 4.7's longer-context, harder-reasoning strengths, DeepSeek V3 is the far cheaper default. If you're running long, multi-hour agentic coding tasks where Grok 4.7's self-checking and larger context genuinely change the outcome, the premium can be worth paying — test both against your actual workload rather than assuming price alone decides it.