Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between DeepSeek's DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and xAI's Grok 4.6.
| Metric | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash | Grok 4.6 | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | DeepSeek | xAI | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.30 | $2.00 | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (85% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.006 | $0.50 | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash lower |
| Output / 1M | $1.20 | $6.00 | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash lower |
| Context Window | 1.05M | 500k | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (1.05M) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 384k | 128k | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash |
| Tokenizer Family | DeepSeek Byte-Level BPE (100k vocabulary) | xAI Byte-level BPE (~131k vocabulary) | — |
| Workload (per month) | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash | Grok 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Chatbot10k requests · 500 in / 200 out | $3.90 | $22.00 |
| RAG app100k requests · 8,000 in / 1,200 out | $384.00 | $2,320.00 |
| Coding agent100k requests · 12,000 in / 2,000 out | $600.00 | $3,600.00 |
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 Grok 4.6 when looking for xAI's tooling integration, specific context window depth (500k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $6/M rate.
At a typical 3:1 input-to-output token mix, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash is about 83% cheaper than Grok 4.6. DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash costs $0.3 per 1M input and $1.2 per 1M output tokens; Grok 4.6 costs $2 and $6.
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash has the larger context window: 1.05M tokens vs 500k.
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: yes, cached input costs $0.006/1M. Grok 4.6: yes, cached input costs $0.5/1M.