Model Comparison

v2.0

Price Data Last Verified: March 21, 2026

DeepSeek R1 vs Qwen 3.5-Turbo: AI API Cost Comparison (2026)

This page compares per-token pricing and context limits for DeepSeek R1 and Qwen 3.5-Turbousing a standard scenario of 10,000 input tokens and 10,000 output tokens.

Model A

DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek

Input / 1M
$0.55
Output / 1M
$2.19
Context Window
64K

Model B

Qwen 3.5-Turbo

Alibaba

Input / 1M
$0.05
Output / 1M
$0.20
Context Window
128K

Cost Breakdown Table

ModelInput CostOutput CostTotal Cost
DeepSeek R1$0.0055$0.0219$0.0274
Qwen 3.5-Turbo$0.0005$0.002$0.0025

Verdict

High Volume

Best pick: Qwen 3.5-Turbo for a 2,000,000 in /2,000,000 out workload.

Low Budget

Best pick: Qwen 3.5-Turbo for a 10,000 in /10,000 out request profile.

About the Methodology

Cost estimates are generated from published input and output token rates for each provider. We apply identical token scenarios to both models in this comparison, so the result reflects price differences only. Pricing values are reviewed weekly against official API documentation and updated when changes are verified.