Standard Compute
Cost per coding-agent request

Is DeepSeek V4 Flash or Mistral Large 3 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Mistral Large 3 costs 2.3x as much as DeepSeek V4 Flash per request ($0.012 vs $0.0052 on our measured traffic), because Mistral Large 3 lists at $0.50 input, $0.05 cached input and $1.50 output per million tokens against $0.30, $0.006 and $1.20 for DeepSeek V4 Flash.

List prices: DeepSeek API pricing, Mistral API pricing, checked 2026-10-13. Request costs: Standard Compute gateway data, 79,301 coding-agent requests from 75 users, Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026. How we compute this

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Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list priceDeepSeek V4 FlashMistral Large 3
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached$0.0033$0.0071
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached$0.0078$0.018
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cachedn/an/a
Average request$0.0052$0.012
100 requests$0.52$1.19
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes$0.066$0.14
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days$6.20$15.10

Each logged request priced at the vendor’s list rates for its own token counts, including cache reads and any higher rate for long prompts. Average output: 698 tokens per request. Both models are priced on the requests up to 262K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial AnalysisDeepSeek V4 FlashMistral Large 3
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100399
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal26.8%0.0%
Output speedmedian195 tokens/s73 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time11 s1.1 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Max), speed on DeepSeek; Mistral Large 3, speed on Mistral. Fetched October 13, 2026. Artificial Analysis runs Terminal-Bench 4.0 in its own setup, so its scores differ from the tbench.ai leaderboard.

What to watch for

Mistral Large 3's 262K window cannot take 12% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. 87% of agent input is read from cache, and Mistral Large 3 charges $0.05 per million for it against $0.006. DeepSeek V4 Flash is superseded: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash costs $0.0067 per request.

FAQ

Is DeepSeek V4 Flash cheaper than Mistral Large 3 for coding agents?
Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.52 on DeepSeek V4 Flash and $1.19 on Mistral Large 3. A median 16-request session costs $0.066 vs $0.14. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 262K tokens that both can take.
How much does a month of Mistral Large 3 vs DeepSeek V4 Flash cost?
For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $15.10 on Mistral Large 3 and $6.20 on DeepSeek V4 Flash at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.
DeepSeek V4 Flash vs Mistral Large 3: which is better for agents?
DeepSeek V4 Flash scores higher on output quality (7.7/10 vs 3.4/10), while DeepSeek V4 Flash is the cheaper option. DeepSeek V4 Flash is best for existing setups that still call the deepseek-v4-flash name; Mistral Large 3 is best for general open-weight text work where EU provenance matters. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.
Can I switch between DeepSeek V4 Flash and Mistral Large 3 in the same agent?
Yes. Model-agnostic agents (Cline, Aider, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, Kilo Code, OpenCode) let you swap models per task. Many people route hard tasks to the stronger model and routine work to the cheaper one.

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time. 1 vote cast so far.

Output Quality

Correctness and depth of what it produces

100%1 vote0%

Agentic Ability

Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks

Speed

Tokens per second and time-to-first-token

Value for Money

How much capability you get per dollar

Reliability

Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

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