DeepSeek V4.1 Flash API: Speed, Latency & Cost

DeepInfra’s review presents DeepSeek V4.1 Flash as an MIT-licensed, open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts model designed to offer high-end reasoning, coding, long-context, and image-understanding capabilities at relatively low API costs. Released in September 2026 as DeepSeek phases out V4-Pro, the model has 552 billion total parameters but activates 8 billion for inputs and 16 billion for outputs through a causal encoder-decoder design, supports a one-million-token context window, and provides a configurable reasoning-effort setting. The review cites an Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score of 40, strong results on benchmarks including MMLU, AIME 2025, and Deep SWE, and output speeds ranging from roughly 211 to 546 tokens per second depending on provider, while noting that real-world coding results may not always match benchmark performance. Pricing starts at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens during off-peak periods, with a 98% cache-hit discount that may benefit repeated agentic workflows, although the model’s above-average verbosity can increase output-token costs. It is available through several API providers and can be self-hosted, but its 510 GB checkpoint and substantial GPU-memory requirements make self-hosting dependent on enterprise-grade infrastructure, positioning API access as more economical for lower-volume users.

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