It now costs about three cents to push one of the world’s better-known AI models through a full benchmark suite. That is the figure from Artificial Analysis, which found that a version of DeepSeek’s flagship model, V4-Flash, is by far the cheapest well-known model to run.
The independent research firm measured the cost of completing its Intelligence Index test battery on each model. V4-Flash came in at roughly three cents, and the nearest comparisons were not close: Moonshot’s Kimi K3 cost 86 cents, OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol $1.86, and Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 $3.15.
On published pricing, DeepSeek charges $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens for the model. Those are the sort of numbers that quietly redefine what ‘expensive’ means at the frontier.
V4-Flash is the lighter half of the pair DeepSeek shipped when it returned with V4-Pro and V4-Flash, with the heavier V4-Pro aimed at harder reasoning. Flash is built for volume: fast, cheap, and good enough for a large share of everyday work.
The catch is capability, and the numbers are honest about it. V4-Flash scored 50 out of 100 on the Intelligence Index, level with Google’s Gemini 3.6 Flash and just behind Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 and Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, both on 51.
