DeepSeek V4 Flash

Best for

High-concurrency, low-latency coding assistance and batch page generation on a tight budget

Price & access

Peak $0.44 in / $1.32 out per 1M; off-peak exactly half at $0.22/$0.66; cache-hit input $0.014 peak / $0.007 off-peak. Peak hours 01:00-04:00 and 06:00-10:00 UTC Mon-Fri.

Evidence summary

First-party pricing and version table, first-party weights card with harness disclosure, two preference boards, two benchmark leaderboards plus an independent Qwen re-run, and AA speed measurements.

Edition status

No prior snapshot. Tracked in the September 2026 baseline.

Strengths

• Fastest time-to-first-token measured here (0.95 s) with 131.8 tok/s throughput
• Terminal-Bench 2.1 82.7% and SWE-bench Verified 79.0% at $0.44/$1.32
• MIT-licensed 304B weights - practical to self-host on a single high-end node
• 2,500-request concurrency limit, 5x the V4 Pro tier

Tradeoffs

• Design Arena Website 1223-1255 puts visual taste in the bottom third
• SWE-bench Pro 52.6% is mid-pack
• Text-only unless you switch to the vision-exp sibling
• Two different Design Arena rows for near-identical names invite confusion