Deepseek v4.1 flash is live at $0.15 per million input tokens off-peak with a 1m context, and its…
deepseek v4.1 flash is live at $0.15 per million input tokens off-peak with a 1m context, and its own launch table puts it ahead of v4 pro on every agentic coding and tool-use row. the cheaper tier is the better agent model.
pricing tiers just stopped being quality tiers.
Context
DeepSeek's API docs post, dated 10 September 2026, says V4.1-Flash has benchmark results ahead of flagship models including DeepSeek-V4-Pro, and that tests by multiple parties put it ahead of V4-Pro on performance, cost, speed and total runtime. From 04:00 UTC on 14 September 2026, deepseek-v4-pro requests route to V4.1-Flash at Flash rates until V4.1-Pro launches. The pricing page lists deepseek-flash as V4.1-Flash with 1M context and off-peak input at 0.003 dollars cache hit and 0.15 dollars cache miss per million tokens, output 0.6 dollars, with off-peak at half the peak rate.
This note is a repost of an earlier Threads post whose dollar figure was lost in posting; the 0.15 is the first-party off-peak cache-miss input price per million tokens. The pricing page is current as read, not a launch-date record, though Dataconomy, 11 September 2026, gives the same off-peak figures. Ahead of V4 Pro on every agentic coding and tool-use row is unverified, since the benchmark table is an image that was not read. Vendor-reported. The cheaper tier is the better agent model is the author's opinion.
Related work
Watch next
- The launch benchmark table, read row by row.
Sources
- DeepSeek V4.1 news (DeepSeek API docs)api-docs.deepseek.com
- Models and pricing (DeepSeek API docs)api-docs.deepseek.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 4 October 2026 at 20:00 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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