DeepSeek V4-Flash Dominates Competitors in Cost-Performance, Operating Costs Only 1/105 of Claude's

According to Reuters, the latest V4-Flash API model officially released by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek on July 31 incurred operating costs of only 1/105 that of Anthropic Claude Fable 5 in benchmark tests conducted by AI performance analysis agency Artificial Analysis. Regarding specific pricing, V4-Flash input token costs are $0.14 per million, and output token costs are $0.28 per million, with an average cost per test of approximately 3 cents, far lower than Wenxin Kimi K3 (86 cents), OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol ($1.86), and Claude Fable 5 ($3.15). In terms of performance, V4-Flash scored 50 points on the Comprehensive Intelligence Index, tying with Google Gemini 3.6 Flash, but still more than 9 points lower than leading models such as Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6. It is worth noting that a low listed price does not equate to low actual costs—if the model consumes more inference and output tokens when generating responses, actual expenses may rise significantly.