DeepSeek R1 vs Gemini 3.1 Pro

For a typical workload (100,000 requests / mo), DeepSeek R1 is the cheapest — 80% less than the priciest here ($146.00/mo vs $720.00/mo).

Projected monthly cost

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.

Native audio, video, and document understanding with a ~1M token context window — strong fit for multi-modal RAG and large-document analysis.

Output token cost is steep relative to input, and the largest context windows can be slow to fill — chunk large documents where possible.

Vendor list rates · per-request examples assume 1,200 input + 400 output tokens.