Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek R1
List-price comparison ·Claude Sonnet 4.6 details ·DeepSeek R1 details
For a typical workload (100,000 requests / mo), DeepSeek R1 is the cheapest — 85% less than the priciest here ($146.00/mo vs $960.00/mo).
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek R1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $3.00 | $0.500 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | $2.15 |
| Typical request (1,200 in + 400 out) | $0.0096 | $0.0015 |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 163,840 tokens |
| Max output | 128k tokens | 32,768 tokens |
| Quality score | 88/100 | 84/100 |
| Tier | Balanced | Flagship |
| Provider | Anthropic | DeepSeek |
Projected monthly cost
| Requests / mo | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek R1 |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $9.60 | $1.46 |
| 10,000 | $96.00 | $14.60 |
| 100,000 | $960.00 | $146.00 |
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Strong price-to-performance for production agents: reliable tool use, structured JSON output, and solid coding ability at roughly a fifth of Opus's cost.
Can still misstep on the hardest multi-step reasoning chains where Opus would succeed — budget for occasional escalation to a flagship model.
DeepSeek R1
Chain-of-thought reasoning competitive with closed flagship models on math and logic benchmarks, at open-weight pricing.
Emits long reasoning traces that inflate output token counts and cost — cap reasoning length or use a distilled variant for latency-sensitive paths.
More comparisons
Vendor list rates · per-request examples assume 1,200 input + 400 output tokens.