Neither wins outright: DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is the pick when you need log-probabilities, Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025 when cost matters at scale.
| Spec | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $0.02 | $0.10 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $1.00 | $0.40 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $0.27 | $0.18 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 65% | 72% |
| Context window | 1.0M tokens (~1,573 pages) | 1.0M tokens (~1,573 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 80% | 80% |
| Max output per response | 944K tokens (~707,800 words) | 66K tokens (~49,200 words) |
| Input types | text, image | text, image, file, audio, video |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | No |
| Listed since | 2026-09-10 | 2025-09-25 |
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 | Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $21.50 | $15.50 | Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025 saves $6.00 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $12.40 | $16.00 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $3.60 |
| 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) | $14.40 | $16.80 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $2.40 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $7.60 | $10.40 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $2.80 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $2.00 | $5.40 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $3.40 |
| Capability | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025 | 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 | — | ✓ Yes | 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 | — | — | answer from live web results |
| Seed (reproducible sampling) | ✓ Yes | ✓ 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.
| Date | Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-24 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | $0.02 | $1.00 |
| 2026-10-23 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | $0.17 | $0.66 |
| 2026-10-22 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | $0.30 | $1.20 |
| 2026-10-21 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | $0.05 | $0.53 |
| 2026-10-20 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | $0.04 | $0.01 |
| 2026-10-19 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | $0.05 | $0.12 |
| 2026-10-18 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | $0.07 | $0.14 |
| 2026-10-17 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | $0.03 | $0.14 |
Neither wins outright: DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is the pick when you need log-probabilities, Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025 when cost matters at scale. In short: DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash when you need log-probabilities, you generate long outputs in one go, you want the newer model; Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025 when cost matters at scale, you need audio input, you need file / PDF input.
Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025 is cheaper: $0.18 vs $0.27 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 34% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $15.50 against $21.50.
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash costs $0.02 per 1M input tokens and $1.00 per 1M output tokens; Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025 costs $0.10 input and $0.40 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Both take 1.0M tokens per request — roughly 1,573 pages of text.
Tool calling — DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: yes, Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025: yes. JSON-schema structured output — DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: yes, Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025: yes.
Yes, both accept image input.
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash can write up to 944K tokens (about 707,800 words) per response; Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025 up to 66K (about 49,200 words).
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash was listed on 2026-09-10; Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025 on 2025-09-25.
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: input price cut 88% ($0.17 → $0.02/1M), output price raised 34% ($0.66 → $1.00/1M) on 2026-10-24 (27 price changes since 2026-09-11). Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-03-10.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is a sparse mixture-of-experts model from DeepSeek, and the first built on the company's Causal Encoder-Decoder (CED) architecture. It activates 8B parameters on input and 16B on...
Full DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash specs →Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is a lightweight reasoning model in the Gemini 2.5 family, optimized for ultra-low latency and cost efficiency. It offers improved throughput, faster token generation, and better performance across common benchmarks compared to earlier Flash models. By default, "thinking" (i.e. multi-pass reasoning) is disabled to prioritize speed, but developers can enable it via the [Reasoning API parameter](https://openrouter.ai/docs/use-cases/reasoning-tokens) to selectively trade off cost for intelligence.
Full Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025 specs →