R1 API Pricing
DeepSeek · Mid-tier · Apache 2.0 · released 2025-01. Prices in USD per 1 million tokens. Data snapshot: 2026-09-28.
R1 has held the same list price since 2026-08-15 and is the 29th cheapest of 108 Mid-tier models. Only one host, Novita, sells it, so there is no second price to shop. It is rated a stable release but does not meet all four criteria of the FinOps Friendly badge.
- Input: $0.70 per 1M tokens
- Output: $2.50 per 1M tokens
- Batch API (input/output): not published
- Prompt-cache read: not published
- Context window: 64K
- Arena ELO: 1398 (as of 2026-09-25)
- Available on: Direct API, AWS Bedrock, OpenRouter (curated by hand, verify with the provider)
- AWS Bedrock regions: us-east-1, us-east-2, us-west-2
R1 market position
On blended price ($1.96 per 1M tokens at 30% input, 70% output) it is cheaper than 74% of Mid-tier models: 29th cheapest of 108. Across every category it is cheaper than 39% of priced text models in the catalogue: 171st cheapest of 281. Its Arena ELO of 1398 ranks 50th of the 68 models that carry one, above 27% of them.
R1 licence, size and capabilities
R1 is open source: its weights are published under Apache 2.0, an OSI-approved licence with no field-of-use limit, so it can be self-hosted as well as bought by the token. Its published size is 671B parameters. Listed capabilities: Text, Reasoning, Code, Agents. Filling its 64K context window once costs $0.04 in input tokens at list price.
Monthly cost at 100K requests, by business use case
From the after-discounts figure (prompt caching on the cached input share, batch API for async workloads, only where the provider publishes those rates), which assumes you implement both, to the list price. One figure means no discount is published.
| Use case | Tokens (in/out) | Monthly (after discounts – list) |
|---|---|---|
| Support Ticket | 1,500 / 500 | $230 |
| Knowledge Q&A | 2,000 / 800 | $340 |
| Meeting Summary | 10,000 / 1,200 | $1000 |
| Marketing Content | 2,500 / 1,800 | $625 |
| Coding Task | 3,000 / 2,000 | $710 |
| Invoice Processing | 1,500 / 600 | $255 |
| Call Summary | 2,000 / 700 | $315 |
| Agent Workflow | 6,000 / 3,000 | $1.2K |
R1 pricing by host
A host is a company that runs the model and sells it by the token — the lab that made it, a cloud platform like Amazon Bedrock, Azure or Vertex, or an independent provider. One model, several sellers, and often several prices. This model is sold by 1 host. The price quoted above is the one we publish so that models stay comparable; it is not necessarily the cheapest way to buy this model. List prices as published on 2026-09-28 via OpenRouter — negotiated rates, committed-use discounts and provisioned capacity are not shown.
Novita is the only host with a published rate, $0.70 input / $2.50 output per 1M tokens, which is the price shown on this page. It serves a quantized fp8 build, which is not the same product as the full-precision model.
| Host | Input $/1M | Output $/1M |
|---|---|---|
| Novita (the price shown above) — fp8 | $0.70 | $2.50 |
R1 price history
R1 has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $0.70 input / $2.50 output per 1M tokens. No list price change since tracking began on 2026-08-15. Last checked against the 2026-09-28 snapshot.
Alternatives to R1
- Next cheaper Mid-tier model: Kimi K2 0905 (Moonshot) at $1.93 blended, 2% less.
- Next more expensive: Grok 4.20 (xAI) at $2.13 blended, 8% more.
The nearest Mid-tier models on Arena ELO, each with its blended price and score difference against R1.
- o4 Mini (OpenAI) — $1.10 in / $4.40 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1391: 74% more expensive, 7 ELO points lower
- GPT-5 Mini (OpenAI) — $0.25 in / $2.00 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1390: 25% cheaper, 8 ELO points lower
- Mistral Large (Mistral) — $2.00 in / $6.00 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1413: 145% more expensive, 15 ELO points higher
- Claude Haiku 4.5 (Anthropic) — $1.00 in / $5.00 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1414: 94% more expensive, 16 ELO points higher
- Cheapest within 15 Arena points: MiniMax M2.5 (MiniMax), 57% cheaper, 7 ELO points lower, out of 10 models in that band.
- Highest Arena ELO within 20% of this price: GLM 5.2 (Zhipu), 17% cheaper, 78 ELO points higher, out of 9 models in that price band.
Common questions about R1 pricing
- How much does R1 cost?
- R1 costs $0.70 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens on the API.
- Does R1 offer batch or cached pricing?
- No batch or cache pricing is published for this model.
- What would R1 cost per month?
- For a support-ticket workload (1,500 input + 500 output tokens per request) at 100K requests/month, R1 costs about $230 at list prices.
- Has the price of R1 changed?
- R1 has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $0.70 input / $2.50 output per 1M tokens. No list price change since tracking began on 2026-08-15. Last checked against the 2026-09-28 snapshot.
These are list prices: real cost also depends on caching, batching, negotiated discounts, marketplace agreements, and existing contracts. Get a FinOps review from OptimNow or compare all models.
Build the business case for R1 in the AI ROI Calculator: add your business value on top of these costs to get ROI, break-even and payback.
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