Is DeepSeek V3 a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats DeepSeek V3 on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.
13 undominated of 136 · Sep 23, 2026
As of Sep 23, 2026, DeepSeek V3 is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 139.5 higher and costs 49% less, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
GLM 5.3 Flash is both better and cheaper than DeepSeek V3: 139.5 points higher on LMArena and 49% less per million tokens, $0.23 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1332.4
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.463/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1471.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.237/M
DeepSeek V3 takes text, returns up to 16,384 tokens from a 163,840-token context, and is listed by 2 sellers.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 23 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. DeepSeek V3 scores 1332.4 at $0.46 per million tokens for this mix.
Envelope-safe replacements
Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLM 5.3 Flash | 1471.9 +139.5 | $0.237/M | 49% |
| Gemma 4 31B | 1441.7 +109.3 | $0.153/M | 67% |
| Hy3 | 1440.6 +108.2 | $0.144/M | 69% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1434.5 +102.1 | $0.143/M | 69% |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1431.8 +99.4 | $0.103/M | 78% |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | 1429.9 +97.5 | $0.450/M | 3% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.4 +95.0 | $0.175/M | 62% |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | 1424.8 +92.4 | $0.302/M | 35% |
| DeepSeek V3.2 Exp | 1422.6 +90.2 | $0.305/M | 34% |
| Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 | 1419.8 +87.4 | $0.153/M | 67% |
| DeepSeek V3.1 | 1419.7 +87.3 | $0.425/M | 8% |
| Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct | 1417.6 +85.2 | $0.343/M | 26% |
| DeepSeek V3.1 Terminus | 1416.9 +84.5 | $0.453/M | 2% |
| Step 3.5 Flash | 1403.7 +71.3 | $0.150/M | 68% |
| Qwen3.5-Flash | 1397.7 +65.3 | $0.114/M | 75% |
| Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 | 1383.6 +51.2 | $0.084/M | 82% |
| Solar Pro 4 | 1377.3 +44.9 | $0.158/M | 66% |
| DeepSeek V3 0324 | 1375.0 +42.6 | $0.438/M | 5% |
| GPT-5.4 Nano | 1372.9 +40.5 | $0.463/M | 0% |
| Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Thinking | 1367.8 +35.4 | $0.412/M | 11% |
| GLM 4.7 Flash | 1352.2 +19.8 | $0.145/M | 69% |
| MiniMax M2 | 1342.1 +9.7 | $0.446/M | 4% |
| Trinity Large Thinking | 1341.8 +9.4 | $0.388/M | 16% |
Higher score, lower price, named losses
Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You give up |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLM 4.5 Air | 1383.7 | $0.310/M | context |
| GLM 4.6V | 1376.5 | $0.450/M | context |
| gpt-oss-120b | 1365.9 | $0.262/M | context |
| Gemma 3 27B | 1357.7 | $0.172/M | context |
| Mercury 2 | 1357.6 | $0.375/M | context |
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