One DeepSeek model, 41 endpoints, a 13x price gap on OpenRouter
OpenRouter lists 41 endpoints for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and output prices for that one model run from $0.18 to $2.40 per million tokens.
By Morgan Laning · Published
Why it matters
Teams picking an open-weight model often compare model against model, but the provider can change the bill by more than 10x for the same weights. OpenRouter's default routing favors the cheapest providers, so whatever a cheap endpoint gives up on precision, speed or reliability is what many developers end up getting unless they set filters.
The same model, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, costs anywhere from $0.18 to $2.40 per million output tokens on OpenRouter, depending on which company runs it. That is a 13.3x spread across 41 endpoints from 33 providers.
RuntimeWire pulled the figures from OpenRouter's public API at 11:13 AM CT on Oct 25th, 2026. Prices change often. An earlier pull at 7:33 AM CT the same day showed the same endpoints. The only price change was Alibaba's, and the API lists time-of-day pricing for Alibaba.…
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