💰 DeepSeek vs OpenAI: Pricing Calculator and Cost Comparison Guide (2025 Edition)

🔍 Introduction

In 2025, AI model providers are not only competing on performance—but increasingly on cost, efficiency, and deployment flexibility. Two major players stand out:

• OpenAI, known for proprietary models like GPT-4, GPT-4o, and ChatGPT Enterprise

• DeepSeek, a rising open-source alternative offering free or self-hosted large language models like DeepSeek-VL, DeepSeek-Coder, and DeepSeek Chat

While OpenAI charges per token or seat, DeepSeek is free to run locally or in the cloud, with costs tied to hardware and compute rather than API access.

In this guide, we’ll build a pricing calculator to help you compare costs across:

• Usage types (chatbots, code assistants, search agents)

• Hosting methods (API-based, local, cloud-hosted)

• Volume scenarios (daily active users, request frequency)

• Model sizes (GPT-4-turbo vs DeepSeek 67B)

✅ Table of Contents

1. Overview: OpenAI Pricing vs DeepSeek

2. API vs Local Hosting: Fundamental Differences

3. DeepSeek Infrastructure Cost Model

4. OpenAI Pricing Model Explained

5. Pricing Calculator Inputs

6. Scenario A: Chatbot with 10K Users

7. Scenario B: Coding Assistant for Developers

8. Scenario C: Document Search Agent

9. Energy and Hardware Cost Considerations

10. Security and Data Sovereignty

11. Future-Proofing: Scalability and Cost Trajectory

12. Conclusion + Pricing Calculator Template Download

1. 💡 Overview: OpenAI vs DeepSeek Pricing

Feature	OpenAI (GPT-4 / ChatGPT)	DeepSeek (Open-source LLMs)
Pricing Model	Pay per 1K tokens or per seat	Free (run on your hardware)
Flexibility	Hosted API, limited access	Fully customizable
Cost	$0.01–$0.03 / 1K tokens	GPU runtime, electricity
Latency	Fast, highly optimized	Depends on local setup
Control	Limited	Full control, auditability

2. 🌐 API vs Local Hosting

Aspect	OpenAI API	DeepSeek Local
Setup Time	Instant	Hours
Maintenance	None	Required
Privacy	Data sent to OpenAI	100% local
Scalability	Elastic	Hardware-bound
Long-term Cost	High	Fixed, scales better

3. 🔧 DeepSeek Cost Model (Self-hosted)

You’ll need:

• GPU (NVIDIA 24GB+ VRAM, e.g., RTX 4090 or A100)

• Local model: deepseek-chat, deepseek-coder, or deepseek-llm

• Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM or LMDeploy to serve model

DeepSeek is free to download and run. Your costs include:

• Hardware amortization (e.g., $2500 GPU over 2 years)

• Electricity ($0.12/kWh average)

• Inference time (based on model size + prompt size)

4. 📊 OpenAI Pricing Model

As of mid-2025:

Model	Input (1K tokens)	Output (1K tokens)	Notes
GPT-3.5	$0.0015	$0.002	Cheapest
GPT-4-turbo	$0.01	$0.03	Standard
GPT-4o	$0.005	$0.015	Optimized
GPT-4 Enterprise	Flat seat pricing	N/A	For teams

If your app sends 2K input + 1K output tokens, that’s:

• GPT-4o: $0.005×2 + $0.015×1 = $0.025/request

10,000 requests/day = $250/day = $7,500/month

5. 🧮 Pricing Calculator Inputs

Parameter	Description	Example
Requests/day	How many API calls	10,000
Input size	Tokens/request	2,000
Output size	Tokens/response	1,000
Model used	GPT-4o / DeepSeek	GPT-4o
Local cost/hour	Power + GPU	$0.20/hour
Response time	Inference latency	1s/request

6. 📦 Scenario A: Chatbot with 10,000 Users

🤖 OpenAI GPT-4o

• 10K requests/day

• 3K tokens/request

• $0.025 per request

• Total: $250/day or $7,500/month

💻 DeepSeek Local (e.g., RTX 4090)

• 10K requests at 1s each = ~3 hours runtime

• GPU + electricity = $0.30/hour

• Total: ~$30/month + hardware amortization

Result: DeepSeek = ~250x cheaper long-term

7. 👨‍💻 Scenario B: Coding Assistant for 100 Developers

• 100 devs × 50 requests/day = 5,000 requests/day

• Input: 1K tokens, Output: 1K tokens = 2K total

GPT-4o:

• 2K tokens/request = $0.015

• 5,000 × $0.015 = $75/day = $2,250/month

DeepSeek-Coder:

• Hosted on shared GPU (e.g., A100 80GB)

• Runtime: 1.5 hours/day

• Cost: ~$50/month

Savings: Over 95% for DeepSeek

8. 📚 Scenario C: Document Search Agent

Architecture:

• Embedding + RAG using LLM

• Input prompt: 2K tokens

• Output: 2K summary

GPT-4:

• $0.01 input + $0.03 output = $0.04

• 1,000 requests/day = $40/day or $1,200/month

DeepSeek:

• Embedding done via local sentence-transformers

• LLM hosted on 2x consumer GPUs

• Daily runtime: 3 hours = ~$20/month

9. ⚡ Energy and Hardware Cost Comparison

Hardware	Upfront	Daily Energy	Notes
RTX 4090	$2,000	0.25kWh/hour	For dev teams
A100 80GB	$15,000	0.35kWh/hour	For large teams
Cloud GPU	$1.5–$4/hour	Included	Flexible, pay-as-you-go

10. 🔐 Security and Data Sovereignty

Concern	OpenAI	DeepSeek
Data control	External	Internal
HIPAA / GDPR	Requires compliance	Fully self-managed
Logging	Not transparent	Full log control
PII masking	Via API tools	Local pre-processing
Military / Gov use	Restricted	Full autonomy

11. 📈 Future-Proofing Cost: Growth Curve

Users	OpenAI Monthly	DeepSeek Monthly
1,000	~$750	~$10 (runtime)
10,000	~$7,500	~$50
100,000	~$75,000	~$500 (GPU cluster)

With DeepSeek, costs grow linearly by hardware scaling; with OpenAI, they scale exponentially by request volume.

12. 📥 Conclusion + Pricing Calculator Template

OpenAI is fast, scalable, and great for MVPs.
But as your usage grows, DeepSeek becomes exponentially cheaper, especially for:

• Chatbots

• Coding tools

• Document summarizers

• Internal enterprise agents

If you value cost control, privacy, and customizability, DeepSeek is the future-ready choice.

📊 Want the Pricing Calculator Template?

I can provide:

• ✅ Excel/Google Sheets calculator

• ✅ Input slider for tokens/request, users, model

• ✅ DeepSeek vs OpenAI monthly cost projections

• ✅ Hardware ROI estimator

• ✅ Integration examples with Ollama and llama.cpp

Let me know if you'd like the Notion version, Google Sheet, or Excel file.