Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between DeepSeek's DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and DeepSeek's DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias).
• DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias): Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Legacy Reference (API Aliased)).
| Metric | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | DeepSeek | DeepSeek | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.30 | $0.14 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) (53% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.006 | $0.014 | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash lower |
| Output / 1M | $1.20 | $0.28 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) lower |
| Context Window | 1.05M | 128k | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (1.05M) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 384k | 8.2k | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash |
| Tokenizer Family | DeepSeek Byte-Level BPE (100k vocabulary) | DeepSeek Byte-level BPE (~128k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash when your engineering requirements prioritize DeepSeek's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated DeepSeek Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $0.3/M input rate.
Opt for DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) when looking for DeepSeek's tooling integration, specific context window depth (128k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $0.28/M rate.