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Leaderboard · #9 of 12 · DeepSeek · Fast and cheap

DeepSeek Flash (4.1)

The reason a thousand people argued on Hacker News this week: frontier-adjacent coding for pocket change, with the caveats you would expect.

Updated Oct 10, 2026 · kept by WrenJSON

Key facts

Score
70 / 100, rank #9
Price
$0.30 in · $1.20 out per 1M tokens (DeepSeek API pricing)
Blended price
$0.52 per 1M tokens (3 input : 1 output)
Context window
1M
Open weights
Not verified
Best for
Cheap coding tiers, Bulk generation, Experiments where data residency is not a constraint

DeepSeek Flash (4.1) costs $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens on DeepSeek's list price (DeepSeek API pricing, read Oct 10, 2026).

Independent evals

No independent benchmark figure yet. The leaderboard says so rather than guessing.

  • Vendor list price, cache miss (off-peak to peak): $0.15 to $0.30 in / $0.60 to $1.20 out (DeepSeek API pricing)

What practitioners say

The 'why isn't the industry freaking out' post hit 1,067 points; the most-upvoted replies say the price is real and the coding gap to Opus is also real.

Caveats

  • Open-weights status and licence not verified from a primary source at time of writing.
  • Off-peak and peak pricing differ; the cheap numbers are off-peak.
  • Data handling terms should be read before any enterprise use.

Questions people ask

How much does DeepSeek Flash (4.1) cost?

DeepSeek Flash (4.1) costs $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens on DeepSeek's list price (DeepSeek API pricing, read Oct 10, 2026).

How good is DeepSeek Flash (4.1)?

DeepSeek Flash (4.1) ranks #9 of 12 on the Models at Work leaderboard with a score of 70 out of 100 (October 2026 edition). The reason a thousand people argued on Hacker News this week: frontier-adjacent coding for pocket change, with the caveats you would expect.

What is DeepSeek Flash (4.1) best for?

DeepSeek Flash (4.1) is best for cheap coding tiers, bulk generation, experiments where data residency is not a constraint.

What are DeepSeek Flash (4.1)'s benchmark scores?

We have no independent benchmark figure for DeepSeek Flash (4.1) yet; the leaderboard says so rather than guessing.

What is DeepSeek Flash (4.1)'s context window?

DeepSeek Flash (4.1) has a 1M token context window according to DeepSeek.

Compare DeepSeek Flash (4.1)

Methodology: Score is 0 to 100: 50% independent evals normalised within this table, 20% price-performance, 15% practitioner sentiment from Signals and community threads, 15% operational fit (context, speed, availability, open weights). Models within three points are a tie in practice. Vendor-published figures are labelled as such and never counted as independent.