DeepSeek Flash pricing for pdf summarization

Quick start

Call DeepSeek Flash 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-flash",
    max_tokens=1500,
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Your prompt here"}]
)
# Cost: ~$0.003150 per call at standard rates
# Input:  $0.15/MTok
# Output: $0.60/MTok

How DeepSeek Flash compares on cost

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

Highest-quality affordable option: Gemini 3 Flash at $0.0120/call (3.8x the cost, 83/100 quality). DeepSeek Flash is already the cheapest choice for pdf summarization.

What drives pdf summarization cost

PDFs are the worst case for input cost: extracted text carries page furniture, headers, and footnotes that inflate token counts well past what the content warrants. Cleaning the extraction before sending it often cuts more cost than changing models. Long PDFs also routinely cross long-context pricing thresholds, so chunking is both a quality and a cost decision.

For DeepSeek Flash specifically, that means output tokens cost 4.0x more than input, at $0.60 vs $0.15 per MTok. At this use case’s 15,000/1,500 token split, output accounts for 29% of the $0.003150 per-call cost.

DeepSeek Flash quality benchmarks for pdf summarization

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

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

About DeepSeek Flash

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: $0.003/MTok input. No batch discount published. Not yet benchmarked, so never recommended.

Other models from DeepSeek

You can compare DeepSeek Flash 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