deepseek api cost
DeepSeek Reasoner vs Claude Sonnet Cost
Reasoning-heavy agents burn more completion tokens. Comparing DeepSeek Reasoner with Claude Sonnet shows whether a dedicated reasoner still beats premium generalist pricing for your DeepSeek API cost plan.
- Reasoner models may use more tokens per answer even when unit prices look attractive.
- Measure tokens on real traces — synthetic short prompts understate agent spend.
- Pair this page with latency SLOs; cost winners can still fail product constraints.
deepseek-reasonerclaude-sonnet
FAQ
Do reasoner tokens count differently?
Billable tokens still follow input/output pricing. Hidden intermediate reasoning can inflate output counts depending on the API surface.
When is Sonnet worth it?
When evals show fewer retries. Retries multiply cost and can erase DeepSeek's unit-price advantage.
What seed traffic should finance use?
Use peak RPS times 30 days, then apply a duty-cycle factor if the agent is not always busy.
Related comparisons
Go deeper in the full calculator
Add more models, tune prompts, and export CSV for finance reviews.
Open LLM Cost Calculator