Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between DeepSeek's DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) and Google's Gemini 3.8 Pro.
• DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias): Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Legacy Reference (API Aliased)).
| Metric | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) | Gemini 3.8 Pro | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | DeepSeek | — | |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.14 | $4.00 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) (97% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.014 | $0.40 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) lower |
| Output / 1M | $0.28 | $18.00 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) lower |
| Context Window | 128k | 1.05M | Gemini 3.8 Pro (1.05M) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 8.2k | 64k | Gemini 3.8 Pro |
| Tokenizer Family | DeepSeek Byte-level BPE (~128k vocabulary) | Google Gemini SentencePiece (256k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) when your engineering requirements prioritize DeepSeek's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Exact DeepSeek Tokenizer (±2%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $0.14/M input rate.
Opt for Gemini 3.8 Pro when looking for Google's tooling integration, specific context window depth (1.05M tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $18/M rate.