Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between DeepSeek's DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Mini.
| Metric | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash | GPT-5.6 Mini | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | DeepSeek | OpenAI | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.30 | $0.30 | Identical |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.006 | $0.03 | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash lower |
| Output / 1M | $1.20 | $1.20 | Identical |
| Context Window | 1.05M | 400k | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (1.05M) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 384k | 16.4k | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash |
| Tokenizer Family | DeepSeek Byte-Level BPE (100k vocabulary) | OpenAI o200k_base (200k vocabulary) | — |
| Workload (per month) | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash | GPT-5.6 Mini |
|---|---|---|
| Chatbot10k requests · 500 in / 200 out | $3.90 | $3.90 |
| RAG app100k requests · 8,000 in / 1,200 out | $384.00 | $384.00 |
| Coding agent100k requests · 12,000 in / 2,000 out | $600.00 | $600.00 |
Standard rates, no caching or batch discounts. Model your own numbers below.
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 GPT-5.6 Mini when looking for OpenAI's tooling integration, specific context window depth (400k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $1.2/M rate.
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and GPT-5.6 Mini cost about the same at a typical 3:1 input-to-output token mix.
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash has the larger context window: 1.05M tokens vs 400k.
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: yes, cached input costs $0.006/1M. GPT-5.6 Mini: yes, cached input costs $0.03/1M.