# DeepSeek V4 Flash pricing on OpenRouter

> DeepSeek V4 Flash bills $0.14 per million input and $0.28 output through OpenRouter. A routed rate can change without an invoice line telling you.

URL: https://getculpa.com/deepseek-deepseek-v4-flash-pricing
Last reviewed: 2026-08-03
Rates effective: 2026-08-03

## Answer
DeepSeek V4 Flash bills $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 output through OpenRouter, with cached input at $0.028. A routed rate carries a risk a direct one doesn't, because your invoice shows a router total rather than a line per model. Culpa, a local-first LLM cost, margin, and forecast ledger, prices each routed call from a dated price book so a change shows up.

## Why this happens
When you call a provider directly, a price change eventually reaches you as an invoice you can read. Route through an aggregator and the invoice becomes one number covering every model you touched, so the per-model rate stops being something anybody checks. Culpa's own book proves how that goes wrong. It carried $0.089 and $0.180 per million for this model, and the live API reads $0.140 and $0.280. Nobody can now say whether the first pair was mis-read in July or the price rose since, because OpenRouter publishes no history. That's the whole problem in one row.

## What this usually looks like
- Your router invoice is one line and your model mix is a dozen.
- Nobody can say what any single routed model costs you per million tokens.
- Router spend rose and the call count held steady, with no rate card to check against.
- The rate you budgeted with was copied once and never re-read.

## Common mistakes
- Budgeting a routed model from a rate you copied once. Why it hurts: A routed rate can move without an invoice line to announce it. Do instead: Re-read the router's own API on a schedule and date every rate you store.
- Reading a router invoice as a per-model cost. Why it hurts: It's a total across every model you routed, so no single model's rate is visible in it. Do instead: Price each call from a dated book, then reconcile the sum against the router total.
- Assuming a cached read costs a tenth here. Why it hurts: It's $0.028 against $0.14, a fifth rather than a tenth, so a cached line budgeted at a 90% discount costs twice what you planned. Do instead: Divide the cached rate by the input rate per model. That fraction is your real discount.

## Self-check
- Read the router's models API and write down today's rate with today's date beside it.
- Compare that against whatever rate your budget or tooling currently holds.
- Price your own routed calls from the dated rate and sum them.
- Put that sum beside the router's invoice total for the same period.
- Repeat monthly. On a routed model the re-read is the only thing that catches a change.

## What a rate that moved 57% costs before anybody notices (illustrative)
A workload of 400M input and 120M output tokens a month on DeepSeek V4 Flash through OpenRouter, priced at the rate Culpa's book held until 2026-08-03 and at the rate the live API reports now. Volumes are modelled, both rate pairs are real.
  At the old book rate: (400 x $0.089) + (120 x $0.18) = $35.60 + $21.60 = $57.20
  At the rate read from the API 2026-08-03: (400 x $0.14) + (120 x $0.28) = $56.00 + $33.60 = $89.60
  The same tokens cost $32.40 more a month, a 57% increase
  Nothing in a router invoice separates that from a volume increase
  Cached input at $0.028 against $0.14 is a 5x discount, not the 10x of a frontier model
A 57% rate move on unchanged traffic, invisible in a router total. The reconciliation is what turns it back into something you can see, and it needs a dated rate on your side of the wire.

## Cost figures
Every figure carries its confidence and its source. No figure on this site is provider-reported.
- $0.14 per million, DeepSeek V4 Flash input rate through OpenRouter [calculated] Source: openrouter.ai/api/v1/models reports 0.00000014 per input token, read 2026-08-03. Multiplied to a per-million figure. Seeded as migration 0034.
- $57.20 to $89.60, modelled monthly cost of one workload at the superseded rate and at the current one [estimated] Source: Both endpoints from the teardown arithmetic at the two real dated rates. A range because the token volumes are modelled.

## FAQ
Q: How much does DeepSeek V4 Flash cost on OpenRouter?
A: $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 output, with cached input at $0.028, read from OpenRouter's models API on 2026-08-03. Culpa's price book held $0.089 and $0.18 before that date and both rows are kept, so calls price at whichever rate was in force.

Q: Why does Culpa keep the old rate as well?
A: Because nobody can prove it wrong. OpenRouter publishes no price history, so whether July was mis-transcribed or the price rose since is unknowable. Rewriting a rate Culpa can't vouch for would be inventing history, so the correction is dated instead.

Q: Is the cached discount the same as on a frontier model?
A: No. Cached input here is $0.028 against $0.14 of uncached, a fifth of the input rate rather than a tenth. Anthropic and Gemini bill a tenth on every model. Groq bills about half where it offers a cached rate at all. The discount is set per model, and worth reading rather than assuming.

## Sources
- OpenRouter models: https://openrouter.ai/models

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