DeepSeek V3 pricing for email summarization

Quick start

Call DeepSeek V3 with the OpenAI Python SDK pointed at api.deepseek.com:

import os
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.deepseek.com/v1",
    api_key=os.environ["DEEPSEEK_API_KEY"],
)
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="deepseek-v3",
    max_tokens=500,
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Your prompt here"}]
)
# Cost: ~$0.001360 per call at standard rates
# Input:  $0.27/MTok
# Output: $1.10/MTok

How DeepSeek V3 compares on cost

Per-call cost for all models scoring 50+ on email summarization benchmarks. Hover for details.

Highest-quality affordable option: Gemini 3 Flash at $0.003000/call (2.2x the cost, 83/100 quality). DeepSeek V3 is already the cheapest choice for email summarization.

What drives email summarization cost

Individually cheap, collectively expensive. A single thread is small, but summarization runs across an inbox at volume, so per-call price multiplied by message count is the number that matters, not the cost of any one summary. This is the use case where a fast-tier model and batch processing usually beat a smarter model outright.

For DeepSeek V3 specifically, that means output tokens cost 4.1x more than input, at $1.10 vs $0.27 per MTok. At this use case’s 3,000/500 token split, output accounts for 40% of the $0.001360 per-call cost.

DeepSeek V3 quality benchmarks for email summarization

Benchmark data for email summarization is pending for DeepSeek V3. Test against your own evaluation suite before moving to production.

Benchmark data is not yet available for DeepSeek V3. We recommend testing against your own evaluation criteria.

About DeepSeek V3

Prices are off-peak rates from api-docs.deepseek.com (read 2026-10-11). Peak-hour prices are 2x the listed input and output rates — Tokeven does not model time-of-day tiers; off-peak is used as the base. Cache hit: $0.07/MTok input. No batch discount published. Not yet benchmarked, so never recommended.

Other models from DeepSeek

You can compare DeepSeek V3 head-to-head against any other model on our model comparison pages, or track how pricing has changed over time on the pricing history tracker.

Frequently asked questions