Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between DeepSeek's DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) and xAI's Grok 4.6 Mini.
• DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias): Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Legacy Reference (API Aliased)).
| Metric | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) | Grok 4.6 Mini | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | DeepSeek | xAI | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.14 | $0.40 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) (65% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.014 | $0.10 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) lower |
| Output / 1M | $0.28 | $1.60 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) lower |
| Context Window | 128k | 512k | Grok 4.6 Mini (512k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 8.2k | 64k | Grok 4.6 Mini |
| Tokenizer Family | DeepSeek Byte-level BPE (~128k vocabulary) | OpenAI o200k_base legacy (200k 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 Grok 4.6 Mini when looking for xAI's tooling integration, specific context window depth (512k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $1.6/M rate.