Qwen 3.6 Flash vs DeepSeek: cost comparison
Prices updated 2026-11-06 · computed from live provider data
Short answer: DeepSeek is cheaper on a
3:1 input/output blend — $0.237 per million tokens versus
$0.422, a 44% difference.
DeepSeek offers the larger context window at 1,048,576 tokens, against 1,000,000 for Qwen 3.6 Flash.
Head to head
| Qwen 3.6 Flash | DeepSeek | |
|---|---|---|
| Input, per 1M tokens | $0.188 | $0.190 |
| Output, per 1M tokens | $1.12 | $0.380 |
| Blended 3:1, per 1M | $0.422 | $0.237 |
| Context window | 1,000,000 | 1,048,576 |
| Vendor | qwen | inferenceapis |
Monthly cost at real volumes
| Workload (input / output) | Qwen 3.6 Flash | DeepSeek |
|---|---|---|
| 1M in / 250K out | $0.469 | $0.285 |
| 10M in / 2.5M out | $4.69 | $2.85 |
| 100M in / 25M out | $46.88 | $28.50 |
Which should you pick?
Pick DeepSeek when you need the longer context window (1,048,576 vs 1,000,000 tokens). Pick DeepSeek when price per token dominates your workload — high-volume classification, extraction, or batch summarisation.