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Claude vs GPT-4o vs DeepSeek: Cost Comparison (2026)

By Jocely P. Honore · 6 min read

Claude vs GPT-4o vs DeepSeek: 2026 Cost Comparison

Choosing the right AI model can save you 9x on API costs. Here is the data.

Price Comparison (per million tokens)

ModelInputOutputvs GPT-4o
GPT-4o$2.50$10.00baseline
Claude 3.5 Sonnet$3.00$15.001.5x more expensive
DeepSeek V3.1$0.27$1.109x cheaper
DeepSeek R1$0.55$2.195x cheaper
Llama 3.1 8B (local)$0$0Free

The Optimal Strategy

Do not pick one model — route to the best model per request: chat to local, code to DeepSeek, reasoning to DeepSeek V3.1, vision to GPT-4o, long context to Claude.

Calculate your savings