Neither wins outright: DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 is the pick when you need seed (reproducible sampling), Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor when cost matters at scale.
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
Workload (per month)
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017
Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor
Difference
Customer-support chatbot
50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens)
$23.25
$11.50
Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor saves $11.75
RAG search over documents
20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens)
$24.00
$14.00
Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor saves $10.00
Coding / tool-using agent
2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens)
$25.20
$14.40
Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor saves $10.80
Batch summarisation
10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens)
$15.60
$9.20
Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor saves $6.40
Long-document analysis
500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens)
$8.10
$5.20
Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor saves $2.90
Capabilities side by side
Capability
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017
Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor
What it lets you do
Tool / function calling
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
call your APIs and run agent loops
Structured output (JSON schema)
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
return JSON that validates against your schema
Reasoning / thinking mode
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems
Image input
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
read screenshots, charts and scanned pages
Audio input
—
—
take speech or audio directly
File / PDF input
—
✓ Yes
accept documents without your own parsing step
Image output
—
—
generate images, not just text
Built-in web search
—
✓ Yes
answer from live web results
Seed (reproducible sampling)
✓ Yes
—
repeat a generation for tests and evals
Log-probabilities
✓ Yes
—
read token confidence for classification and scoring
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Price history
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-10-18.
Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-09-03.
Which should you choose?
Choose DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 if…
you need seed (reproducible sampling) — to repeat a generation for tests and evals; Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor does not advertise it
you need log-probabilities — to read token confidence for classification and scoring; Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor does not advertise it
Choose Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor if…
cost matters at scale — it is 52% cheaper on a typical 3:1 input/output mix ($11.50 vs $23.25 a month for 50,000 support chats)
you need file / PDF input — to accept documents without your own parsing step; DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 does not advertise it
you need built-in web search — to answer from live web results; DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 does not advertise it
you generate long outputs in one go — up to 944K tokens (about 707,800 words) per response
Frequently asked questions
Is DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 better than Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor?
Neither wins outright: DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 is the pick when you need seed (reproducible sampling), Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor when cost matters at scale. In short: DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 when you need seed (reproducible sampling), you need log-probabilities; Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor when cost matters at scale, you need file / PDF input, you need built-in web search, you generate long outputs in one go.
Which is cheaper, DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 or Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor?
Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor is cheaper: $0.13 vs $0.26 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 52% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $11.50 against $23.25.
How much do DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor cost per million tokens?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 costs $0.15 per 1M input tokens and $0.60 per 1M output tokens; Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor costs $0.10 input and $0.20 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Which has the bigger context window, DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 or Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor?
Both take 1.0M tokens per request — roughly 1,573 pages of text.
Do DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor support function calling and JSON output?
Can DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 or Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor read images?
Yes, both accept image input.
Is DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 or Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor free to use?
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
What is the maximum output length of DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 can write up to 393K tokens (about 294,900 words) per response; Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor up to 944K (about 707,800 words).
When were DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor released?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 was listed on 2026-10-17; Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor on 2026-09-02.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 is the October 17, 2026 snapshot of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, served by DeepSeek under the `deepseek-flash` API model name. V4.1 Flash is a sparse mixture-of-experts model...
Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor is the cost-efficient contributor tier of Meta’s multimodal reasoning model for experimentation, learning, and early-stage agentic, multi-agent, and coding workflows. It is designed to track information...