Neither wins outright: DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is the pick when cost matters at scale, Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview when you need audio input.
| Spec | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $0.02 | $0.25 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $1.00 | $1.50 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $0.27 | $0.56 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 65% | 50% |
| 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, video, file, audio |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | No |
| Listed since | 2026-09-10 | 2026-03-03 |
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 3.1 Flash Lite Preview | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $21.50 | $48.75 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $27.25 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $12.40 | $45.00 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $32.60 |
| 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 | $48.00 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $33.60 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $7.60 | $29.00 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $21.40 |
| 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 | $14.00 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $12.00 |
| Capability | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview | 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 | — | ✓ Yes | 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 cost matters at scale, Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview when you need audio input. In short: DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash when cost matters at scale, you need log-probabilities, you generate long outputs in one go, you want the newer model; Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview when you need audio input, you need file / PDF input, you need built-in web search.
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is cheaper: $0.27 vs $0.56 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 53% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $21.50 against $48.75.
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash costs $0.02 per 1M input tokens and $1.00 per 1M output tokens; Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview costs $0.25 input and $1.50 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 3.1 Flash Lite Preview: yes. JSON-schema structured output — DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: yes, Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview: 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 3.1 Flash Lite Preview up to 66K (about 49,200 words).
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash was listed on 2026-09-10; Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview on 2026-03-03.
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 3.1 Flash Lite Preview: 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 3.1 Flash Lite Preview is Google's high-efficiency model optimized for high-volume use cases. It outperforms Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite on overall quality and approaches Gemini 2.5 Flash performance across...
Full Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview specs →