DeepSeek R1 vs GPT-5.4 Mini

For a typical workload (100,000 requests / mo), DeepSeek R1 is the cheapest — 46% less than the priciest here ($146.00/mo vs $270.00/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.

Good default for everyday chat, summarization, and lightweight agent steps where GPT-5.4-level reasoning isn't required.

Quality gap widens on long, multi-hop reasoning tasks — needs careful prompt design to avoid silent failures on edge cases.

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