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
Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview
Difference
Customer-support chatbot
50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens)
$14.76
$72.50
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $57.74
RAG search over documents
20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens)
$8.57
$61.00
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $52.43
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)
$9.94
Doesn't fit context
—
Batch summarisation
10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens)
$5.26
$39.00
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $33.74
Long-document analysis
500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens)
$1.40
Doesn't fit context
—
Capabilities side by side
Capability
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview
What it lets you do
Tool / function calling
✓ Yes
—
call your APIs and run agent loops
Structured output (JSON schema)
✓ 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
—
—
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
—
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.
Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-10-16.
Date
Model
Input / 1M
Output / 1M
2026-10-16
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.01
$0.68
2026-10-15
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.02
$0.89
2026-10-14
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.04
$0.60
2026-10-06
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.30
$1.20
2026-10-04
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.0030
$2.40
2026-10-03
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.30
$1.20
2026-10-02
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.02
$0.75
2026-10-01
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.02
$0.40
Which should you choose?
Choose DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash if…
cost matters at scale — it is 79% cheaper on a typical 3:1 input/output mix ($14.76 vs $72.50 a month for 50,000 support chats)
you need to fit long inputs in one request — 1.0M tokens is roughly 1,573 pages, against 48
you need tool / function calling — to call your APIs and run agent loops; Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview does not advertise it
you need structured output (JSON schema) — to return JSON that validates against your schema; Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview does not advertise it
you need seed (reproducible sampling) — to repeat a generation for tests and evals; Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview does not advertise it
you need log-probabilities — to read token confidence for classification and scoring; Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview does not advertise it
you generate long outputs in one go — up to 944K tokens (about 707,800 words) per response
Choose Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview if…
No advantage on the data we track — pick it for provider preference or output quality on your own prompts.
Frequently asked questions
Is DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash better than Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash comes out ahead on the data we track: 7 advantages and none for Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview.
Which is cheaper, DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash or Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is cheaper: $0.18 vs $0.85 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 79% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $14.76 against $72.50.
How much do DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview cost per million tokens?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash costs $0.01 per 1M input tokens and $0.68 per 1M output tokens; Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview costs $0.30 input and $2.50 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Which has the bigger context window, DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash or Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: 1.0M tokens, about 1,573 pages, against 32K (about 48 pages) for Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview.
Do DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview support function calling and JSON output?
Can DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash or Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview read images?
Yes, both accept image input.
Is DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash or Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview 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 and Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash can write up to 944K tokens (about 707,800 words) per response; Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview up to 4K (about 3,100 words).
When were DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview released?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash was listed on 2026-09-10; Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview on 2026-10-15.
Has the price of DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash or Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview changed?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: input price cut 9% ($0.02 → $0.01/1M), output price cut 23% ($0.89 → $0.68/1M) on 2026-10-16 (19 price changes since 2026-09-11). Moondream: Moondream 3 Preview: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-10-16.
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...
Moondream 3 Preview is a vision-language model from Moondream with 9B total parameters and 2B active (mixture-of-experts). It handles visual question answering, captioning, OCR, and visual reasoning over images, with...