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DeepSeek R1 vs GPT-3.5 Turbo: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Apr 8, 2026

⚡ Quick Answer

Compare DeepSeek R1 and GPT-3.5 Turbo across pricing, benchmarks, and capabilities.

Updated: April 8, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek R1GPT-3.5 Turbo
ProviderDeepSeekOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.700$0.500
Output Price / 1M tokens$2.50$1.50
Context Window
128K
16K
Max Output Tokens
8,192
4,096
Arena ELO
1,310
1,120
Coding ELO
1,330
1,100
TTFT (ms)
1,800
150
Tokens/sec
45
100
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingNoYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek R1 excels at reasoning, math, coding, science tasks.

Strengths:

  • Excellent reasoning at a fraction of o3's cost
  • Open-source and self-hostable
  • Top-tier math performance
  • Very competitive with proprietary reasoning models

Best for:

reasoningmathcodingscience
When to Use GPT-3.5 Turbo

GPT-3.5 Turbo excels at cost-effective, general-purpose tasks.

Strengths:

  • Very cheap
  • Fast
  • Widely used

Best for:

cost-effectivegeneral-purpose

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