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OpenAI · DeepSeek — Interactive pricing comparison
DeepSeek V3 costs a fraction of GPT-4.1 and codes nearly as well (50 vs 55), but GPT-4.1 carries a 1M context against V3's 65K and adds vision, so context size and modality usually settle this.
OpenAI
DeepSeek
DeepSeek V3 is 86% cheaper at this usage
GPT-4.1 has a larger context window
Context window is the first thing to check here, because it eliminates V3 from a whole class of work. DeepSeek V3 caps at 65K tokens. GPT-4.1 handles 1M. If you process long documents, large codebases, or extended conversations, that fifteen-fold difference ends the discussion in GPT-4.1's favor.
Within shorter contexts, V3 makes a strong case. It codes at 50 against GPT-4.1's 55 — a real gap, but not a chasm — and it does so at $0.27/$1.1 versus $2/$8. That is dramatically cheaper on both ends. For routine code generation that fits inside 65K tokens, V3 delivers most of the quality for a small fraction of the spend.
The other constraint is vision. V3 has none; GPT-4.1 does. Any pipeline involving screenshots, diagrams, or image input needs GPT-4.1.
What you are really weighing is reach versus price. GPT-4.1 buys you long context, vision, and five points of coding. V3 buys you most of the coding ability at roughly an eighth of the cost, provided your inputs stay small and text-only.
V3 wins on volume economics; GPT-4.1's advantage is the 1M context window it doesn't lose under load. The deciding question is whether your bottleneck is cost per token or tokens per request.
Last updated June 2026