Qwen3.8 Flash vs DeepSeek V4 Flash

Qwen3.8 Flash (Alibaba Cloud) costs $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.47 per million output tokens; DeepSeek V4 Flash (DeepSeek) costs $0.30 and $1.20. Qwen3.8 Flash is 2.3× cheaper for a typical 3:1 input-to-output mix. DeepSeek V4 Flash has the larger context window (1M vs 992K tokens).

Qwen3.8 FlashDeepSeek V4 Flash
ProviderAlibaba CloudDeepSeek
Input / 1M tokens$0.15$0.30
Output / 1M tokens$0.47$1.20
Cached input / 1M$0.016$0.006
Blended (3:1)$0.23$0.52
Context window992K1M
Max output131K393K
VisionYesYes
Tool useYesYes
ReasoningYesYes
Listed sinceSep 20, 2026Jun 20, 2026

Cost per 1,000 requests

WorkloadQwen3.8 FlashDeepSeek V4 Flash
Chatbot reply2,000 input + 500 output tokens$0.54$1.20
RAG / search answer8,000 input + 700 output tokens$1.53$3.24
Long-document summary100,000 input + 2,000 output tokens$15.94$32.40

Blended price history

Qwen3.8 FlashDeepSeek V4 Flash
$0$0.200$0.400$0.600$0.800Jul 26Aug 26Sep 26Oct 26$0.230$0.525

Blended = (3 × input + output) ÷ 4, per million tokens. Each line starts when the model first appeared in the price list.

The companies

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List prices for each provider's own API (USD), taken daily from LiteLLM's public model price list. Batch, caching and committed-use discounts aren't reflected. Price alone says nothing about output quality; check benchmarks and your own evaluations before switching.