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DeepSeek V4 vs o4

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

Verdict

DeepSeek V4 is ~150.0× cheaper on a 3:1 input:output blend. DeepSeek V4 is open-weights, the other is proprietary.

DeepSeek
DeepSeek V4

The shock-the-market moment of 2026. Frontier coding quality at 1/50th the price of Opus.

Unbeatable $/qualityOpen weightsGreat at code
OpenAI
o4

Deep-reasoning model. Spends more tokens thinking to crush math, science, and hard coding problems.

State-of-the-art math and scienceExtremely high-ceiling reasoning
Pricing
Input / 1M$0.14$15.00
Output / 1M$0.28$60.00
Context128K200K
Max output16K100K
LicenseOpen weightsProprietary
Released2026-02-202026-02-18
Benchmarks
LMSYS ELO1334.0
MMLU Pro85.493.8
HumanEval91.592.3
SWE-Bench54.168.0
MATH88.796.2
GPQA82.5
IFEval85.8
Per-task cost
Summarize a 1-hour meeting transcript$0.0022$0.255
Review a 500-line pull request$0.0017$0.240
Answer a customer support ticket$0.0006$0.093
Extract structured data from a resume$0.0010$0.135
Debug a stack trace with context$0.0014$0.210

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