DeepSeek R1 vs Qwen3 Max
List-price comparison · DeepSeek R1 details · Qwen3 Max details
For a typical workload (100,000 requests / mo), DeepSeek R1 costs 42% less — $146.00/mo vs $249.60/mo.
| DeepSeek R1 | Qwen3 Max | |
|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $0.500 | $0.780 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $2.15 | $3.90 |
| Typical request (1,200 in + 400 out) | $0.0015 | $0.0025 |
| Context window | 163,840 tokens | 262,144 tokens |
| Max output | 32,768 tokens | 32,768 tokens |
| Tier | Flagship | Balanced |
| Provider | DeepSeek | Qwen |
Projected monthly cost
Rows open both models in the calculator — adjust volume and token counts there.
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.
Qwen3 Max
Strong multilingual reasoning (especially Chinese/English) and competitive coding benchmarks at open-weight pricing.
Cache-write pricing is unusually high relative to input cost — workloads that rely heavily on prompt caching should benchmark actual savings.
More comparisons
Vendor list rates · per-request examples assume 1,200 input + 400 output tokens.