Comparison page
Llama 4 Maverick vs DeepSeek V4 Pro
Compare a Meta open-weight flagship against a discounted DeepSeek premium model for deployment planning.
Side-by-side pricing
The table uses the same example request on both models so you can compare open weights versus discounted premium hosting without changing the prompt shape.
Input 1,000 / Output 250
| Model | Input / 1M | Cached input / 1M | Output / 1M | Example request | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Llama 4 Maverick Latest released Llama flagship for broad multimodal workloads. Meta does not publish a standard first-party per-token API price in its public docs. | No public rate | No public rate | No public rate | No public rate | Meta pricing docs |
DeepSeek V4 Pro DeepSeek's stronger model with a temporary discount on the public pricing page. The public pricing page currently shows a 75% discount window for V4 Pro through 2026-05-31 15:59 UTC. | $0.435 | $0.0036 | $0.870 | $0.0007 | DeepSeek pricing |
When to choose each model
Llama 4 Maverick
Choose Llama 4 Maverick when you want the economics or capability profile of Meta Llama and you can justify the published rate.
DeepSeek V4 Pro
Choose DeepSeek V4 Pro when you need the second option in this comparison and want to test whether it lowers spend without hurting the workflow.
Use cases
- • Evaluating open-weight hosting economics.
- • Comparing self-hosted control with hosted API pricing.
- • Planning a lower-cost premium deployment path.
If the prompt is noisy or repetitive, run it through the prompt optimizer first.
If the brief is too loose, use the context engineer to tighten the instructions before you compare models again.
For the broader pricing strategy, read the LLM cost optimization pillar and the cost-per-million-tokens cheat sheet.
FAQ
How do I compare an open-weight model here?
Treat the Meta model as a deployment-economics comparison and evaluate hosting cost, inference, and operations in addition to token price.
Which option is cheaper on paper?
DeepSeek V4 Pro is the lower-cost hosted premium option during the current discount window, but the real answer depends on your hosting plan.
Should I use the calculator too?
Yes. The calculator helps you validate the request cost after you account for your own prompt and output lengths.