Is DeepSeek V3.1 Terminus a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats DeepSeek V3.1 Terminus 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 V3.1 Terminus is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 55.0 higher and costs 48% 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 V3.1 Terminus: 55.0 points higher on LMArena and 48% less per million tokens, $0.22 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1416.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.453/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1471.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.237/M
DeepSeek V3.1 Terminus takes text, returns up to 32,768 tokens from a 163,840-token context, and is listed by 4 sellers.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 9 models dominate it and give up nothing, 3 more dominate it but give something up. DeepSeek V3.1 Terminus scores 1416.9 at $0.45 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 +55.0 | $0.237/M | 48% |
| Hy3 | 1440.6 +23.7 | $0.144/M | 68% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1434.5 +17.6 | $0.143/M | 69% |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1431.8 +14.9 | $0.103/M | 77% |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | 1429.9 +13.0 | $0.450/M | 1% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.4 +10.5 | $0.175/M | 61% |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | 1424.8 +7.9 | $0.302/M | 33% |
| DeepSeek V3.2 Exp | 1422.6 +5.7 | $0.305/M | 33% |
| DeepSeek V3.1 | 1419.7 +2.8 | $0.425/M | 6% |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemma 4 31B | 1441.7 | $0.153/M | max output |
| Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 | 1419.8 | $0.153/M | reasoning |
| Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct | 1417.6 | $0.343/M | max output, reasoning |
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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