Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek V3.2
List-price comparison ·Claude Sonnet 4.6 details ·DeepSeek V3.2 details
For a typical workload (100,000 requests / mo), DeepSeek V3.2 is the cheapest — 95% less than the priciest here ($48.28/mo vs $960.00/mo).
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek V3.2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $3.00 | $0.269 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | $0.400 |
| Typical request (1,200 in + 400 out) | $0.0096 | $0.0005 |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 163,840 tokens |
| Max output | 128k tokens | 65,536 tokens |
| Quality score | 88/100 | 79/100 |
| Tier | Balanced | Balanced |
| Provider | Anthropic | DeepSeek |
Projected monthly cost
| Requests / mo | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek V3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $9.60 | $0.4828 |
| 10,000 | $96.00 | $4.83 |
| 100,000 | $960.00 | $48.28 |
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 V3.2
Extremely competitive coding and reasoning benchmarks at a fraction of commercial-API pricing — strong default for cost-sensitive batch workloads.
Open-weight hosting means latency and uptime vary by inference provider (DeepInfra, Fireworks, etc.) — pin a provider or add fallbacks for production SLAs.
More comparisons
Vendor list rates · per-request examples assume 1,200 input + 400 output tokens.