AI model APIs · head-to-head
DeepSeek V4 Flash vs Mistral Small 4
Same usage, official rates, ranked by nothing but price. Both rate cards, the monthly bill at five workloads, and the exact usage mix where the answer flips.
The pricing verdict Mistral Small 4 is cheaper than DeepSeek V4 Flash at every input:output mix — there is no usage pattern where DeepSeek V4 Flash costs less.
Rate cards
| Per 1M tokens | DeepSeek V4 Flash | Mistral Small 4 |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.44 | $0.15 |
| Cached input | $0.014 | $0.015 |
| Output | $1.32 | $0.60 |
| Context window | — | — |
Monthly cost at five workloads
| Workload | Tokens / month | DeepSeek V4 Flash | Mistral Small 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prototype | 1M in · 0.3M out | $0.84 | $0.33 |
| Small app | 10M in · 3M out | $8.36 | $3.30 |
| Production app | 50M in · 15M out | $41.8 | $16.5 |
| High volume | 200M in · 60M out | $167 | $66 |
| Heavy platform | 1B in · 300M out | $836 | $330 |
Standard on-demand rates from each provider's official pricing page, verified July 2026; figures exclude caching and batch discounts and any long-context surcharges. DeepSeek V4 Flash: Cache-hit input bills at $0.014 per 1M at peak ($0.007 off-peak). The legacy deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner names map to this model. Figures use PEAK rates. DeepSeek bills by time of day: peak is 01:00-04:00 and 06:00-10:00 UTC, and off-peak (the other 17 hours) is half these prices. We publish peak so the figure can never understate a bill; halve it for off-peak traffic. Mistral Small 4: Cached input reads bill at 10% of the input rate, with no cache-creation or storage fee. Price is one input — quality, latency and context limits differ. Confirm live pricing before committing.