DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp vs Inception Mercury 2
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp is 1.2× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp accepts longer prompts: 1M vs 128K tokens.
- DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp is the newer model (released 2026-08-21).
| DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp | Mercury 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | DeepSeek | Inception |
| Released | 2026-08-21 | 2026-03-04 |
| Input / 1M | $0.216 | $0.25 |
| Output / 1M | $0.647 | $0.75 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.0069 | $0.025 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.323 | $0.375 |
| Context | 1M | 128K |
| Max output | 262K | 50K |
| Accepts | text, image | text |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 3 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $0.647 | $0.75 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 99.60% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | Operational | — |
Cost calculator
DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp
$22.64 per month$0.75 per day
Mercury 2
$26.25 per month$0.88 per day
DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp saves $3.61 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
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