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DeepSeek R2 vs GPT-5 Mini

DeepSeek vs OpenAI. Specs, benchmarks, and real per-task cost — all in one page.

Verdict

GPT-5 Mini is ~1.1× cheaper on a 3:1 input:output blend. DeepSeek R2 is open-weights, the other is proprietary.

DeepSeek
DeepSeek R2

DeepSeek’s reasoning variant. Competes with o4 on math at a fraction of the cost.

Frontier math at open-weights pricingLong CoT traces
OpenAI
GPT-5 Mini

GPT-5’s smaller, cheaper sibling. Optimized for chat and lightweight agent tasks.

Very low latencyCheap enough for mass consumer apps
Pricing
Input / 1M$0.55$0.50
Output / 1M$2.19$2.00
Context128K256K
Max output64K16K
LicenseOpen weightsProprietary
Released2026-01-152026-01-21
Benchmarks
LMSYS ELO1288.0
MMLU Pro87.878.5
HumanEval90.185.5
MATH94.179.8
GPQA71.2
IFEval85.4
Per-task cost
Summarize a 1-hour meeting transcript$0.0093$0.0085
Review a 500-line pull request$0.0088$0.0080
Answer a customer support ticket$0.0034$0.0031
Extract structured data from a resume$0.0049$0.0045
Debug a stack trace with context$0.0077$0.0070

Per-call cost using published token counts for each task. Real-world prompts vary.