DeepSeek R1 vs GPT-5.4 Nano

For a typical workload (100,000 requests / mo), GPT-5.4 Nano is the cheapest — 49% less than the priciest here ($74.00/mo vs $146.00/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.

Cheapest OpenAI option for high-throughput classification, tagging, and routing — ideal as a first-pass filter before a stronger model.

Limited reasoning depth means it should be treated as a triage layer, not a final answer source, for anything business-critical.

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