---
title: "Cheaper alternatives to DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423 · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/alternatives/deepseek__deepseek-v4-pro/
description: "9 models score at least as high as DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423 and cost no more on a balanced workload. 0 give up nothing measurable; the other 9 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores."
---

# Cheaper alternatives to DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423 · Undominated.ai

> 9 models score at least as high as DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423 and cost no more on a balanced workload. 0 give up nothing measurable; the other 9 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores.

# Cheaper alternatives to DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423

DeepSeek · LMArena 1439.2 · $1.09/M on a balanced workload · prices as of 2026-08-28

## Everything cheaper and higher-scoring gives something up.

Of the 133 models carrying both an independent score and a published price at the same delivery mode, **9** score at least as high as DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423 and cost no more under at least one workload. **9** do not, and every row names what it drops.

Dominance is not a property of a model. It is a property of a model, a capability lens and a workload, and all three are named on every row. Scores are LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset; prices are blended per million tokens. A higher score is not a drop-in replacement.

This page is built from that comparison and nothing else. When no model is both better and cheaper than DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423, it is not generated.

## Where it holds

| Workload | DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423 $/M | Better and cheaper | With a trade |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Balanced | $1.09 | 0 | 9 |
| Summarise | $0.686 | 0 | 9 |
| Chat | $0.979 | 0 | 5 |
| Code gen | $1.33 | 0 | 5 |
| Agentic | $0.526 | 0 | 8 |

Workload mixes are defined on the [methodology page](/methodology/). Cached input is priced at the cached rate, and reasoning tokens at the worse of the reasoning and output rates.

## What you would be replacing

| Intelligence | 1439.2 |
| --- | --- |
| Context window | 1.0M |
| Max output | 384K |
| Input modes | text |
| Tool use | yes |
| Extended reasoning | yes |

A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. [Full record for DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423](/models/deepseek__deepseek-v4-pro/).

## Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 9

These score at least as high and cost no more on the two plotted axes, and lose something that is not on them. Read the last column before switching.

| Model | Intelligence | $/M | Holds under | What you give up |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Gemini 3.7 Flash Google | 1490.2 +51 | $0.750 | Balanced −31% Summarise −48% Chat −11% Code gen −6% Agentic −24% | 384K → 66K max output |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro Xiaomi | 1465 +25.8 | $0.544 | Balanced −50% Summarise −51% Chat −51% Code gen −50% Agentic −54% | 384K → 131K max output |
| Qwen3.7 Plus Qwen | 1456.2 +17 | $0.560 | Balanced −49% Summarise −57% Chat −36% Code gen −34% Agentic −41% | 1.0M → 1.0M context 384K → 131K max output |
| Gemma 4 31B Google | 1441.7 tie | $0.152 | Balanced −86% Summarise −87% Chat −82% Code gen −82% Agentic −80% | 1.0M → 262K context 384K → 16K max output |
| Hy3 Tencent | 1441.2 tie | $0.144 | Balanced −87% Summarise −89% Chat −83% Code gen −83% Agentic −84% | 1.0M → 262K context 384K → 128K max output |
| Kimi K2.5 Moonshot AI | 1445.2 tie | $0.900 | Balanced −17% Summarise −37% Agentic −6% | 1.0M → 262K context 384K → 236K max output |
| GLM 5 Z.ai | 1445.2 tie | $0.930 | Balanced −14% Summarise −23% Agentic −3% | 1.0M → 205K context 384K → 128K max output |
| Qwen3.8 27B Qwen | 1440.8 tie | $0.956 | Balanced −12% Summarise −37% | 1.0M → 1.0M context 384K → 131K max output |
| GLM 4.6 Z.ai | 1439.8 tie | $0.875 | Balanced −20% Summarise −33% Agentic −7% | 1.0M → 205K context 384K → 131K max output |

## What this compares, and what it leaves out

 - Quality is LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset. The 95% confidence interval on a difference between two scores is about ±10.68 points, so a gap smaller than that is marked *tie* rather than an improvement — see [significance bands](/significance/).
 - 188 further models at this delivery mode carry a price but no independent score. They are absent from the comparison in both directions — unrated is not a zero, and an unmeasured model is neither an alternative nor a worse buy.
 - Retired models are never offered as an alternative, and a model only competes against its own delivery mode: batch trades latency for price, so it is not a like-for-like swap.
 - Nothing here measures latency, throughput, rate limits or how a model behaves on your prompts. Two models with the same index score are not interchangeable.
 - The models that nothing beats on both axes are on the [value frontier](/frontier/), and every other model something cheaper beats is [listed here](/alternatives/).