Flash vs. Flagship: How Far Apart Are AI Prices Right Now?

If you're building something and watching your costs, today's pricing spread is genuinely wild. Let me walk you through it.

At the top, gpt-5.5 runs $5.00 in and $30.00 out per million tokens. Claude Opus 4 variants sit at $5.00 in and $25.00 out — competitive with GPT-5.5 on input, a bit cheaper on output. These are the heavy hitters, and you pay for them.

Drop down a tier and Claude Sonnet 4-6 cuts that to $3.00/$15.00. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview comes in at $2.00/$12.00, which is a solid deal for a capable model.

Then things get interesting. DeepSeek V4 Flash — available through both AliCloud US and Singapore — is $0.14 in and $0.28 out. That's not a typo. Compare that to gpt-5.5's $30.00 output price: you'd get over 100x more output tokens for the same dollar.

GPT-4o Mini at $0.15/$0.60 is in the same neighborhood and worth knowing about if you're already in the OpenAI ecosystem.

The honest takeaway: if your use case doesn't need frontier-level reasoning, the cheap models have gotten genuinely good. Match the model to the job, and you can stretch a budget pretty far.