DeepSeek V4.1 Flash hands-on tests and comparisons

Scanning OpenCode's pricing table turns up 15 models free on both input and output, with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3 Flash and Reflection Beam highlighted; Beam's free tier excludes mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau and retains data for 30 days.

Per OpenRouter, the model has a 552B backbone with 8B active when reading and 16B when writing, input priced at $0.0284 per million tokens; the author questions whether real workloads use the 1M context.

The poster claims DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 performs near GPT-6.1 Sol xHigh while priced like GPT-6 Luna, putting OpenAI in a bad spot.

A user says deepseek-v4.1-flash-1017 has better benchmarks, shorter answers and fewer tokens per task, making each finished task cheaper.

A demo of a Can Gun shooter made with Gemini 4 Argon, where every skin and the whole structure are pure JavaScript, with a DeepSeek V4.1 Flash test teased.

The author cites a benchmark chart showing V4.1-Flash-1017 at 77% on DeepSWE v1.1 for about $0.20 per task versus Opus 5 at 74% and about $12, arguing cheap runs make parallel agent experimentation affordable.

The release touts faster performance, better project building and shorter cheaper outputs, plus Search & Fetch APIs open to all from $0.75 per 1,000 calls.

Off-peak pricing per 1M tokens is $0.15 input, $0.60 output and $0.003 cached input; peak rates double and weekends are fully off-peak.

The open-weight V4.1 Flash 1017 improves reasoning, coding, agent and vision benchmarks while cutting task time and output length for lower cost.

The author argues DeepSeek's shorter outputs and faster task completion directly cut latency and API cost without sacrificing benchmark reasoning.

The poster claims V4.1 Flash 1017 beat GPT-6.1 Sol xHigh at roughly the price of GPT-6 Luna and Haiku 5.5 while delivering more, with video evidence.

The post says the new model scores 77.0 on DeepSWE, leads on Terminal-Bench, uses fewer tokens, ships open weights and opens a $0.75/1K-call search API to Claude Code and Codex.