DeepSeek V4 Flash vs GPT-OSS 20B

	DeepSeek V4 Flash	GPT-OSS 20B
Provider	DeepSeek	OpenAI
Model id	`deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash`	`openai/gpt-oss-20b`
Input price	$0.19 / 1M tokens	$0.07 / 1M tokens
Output price	$0.38 / 1M tokens	$0.27 / 1M tokens
Context window	1M tokens	131K tokens
Capabilities	Chat, Reasoning, Coding, Tool calling, 1M context	Chat, Reasoning, Tool calling
Weights	Open	Open
Availability	Available on Inference APIs	Coming soon
Rate limits	No daily caps; pay per request	No daily caps; pay per request
Time to first token	1.42 s	not measured
Output speed	55 tokens / s	not measured

Cost for 1M input + 1M output tokens

DeepSeek V4 Flash

$0.57

GPT-OSS 20B

$0.34

GPT-OSS 20B is about 40% cheaper for this workload at list price.

Measured speed

Speed figures for Inference APIs models are medians of three runs from a European client on 2026-09-16, against the public endpoint, using a ~120-word generation prompt (chat), a 300-character paragraph (speech) or a -second clip (transcription). External models are not measured here; treat "not measured" as unknown, not slow.

When to pick which

DeepSeek V4 Flash — DeepSeek's fast, inexpensive V4 model with a 1M-token context. Strong general assistant and coding model at the lowest price per token here.
GPT-OSS 20B — The small GPT-OSS model: fast and inexpensive for lightweight assistants and classification.

Try DeepSeek V4 Flash

Same OpenAI request shape; the change is the base URL and key. Full parameters, aliases and pricing on the model page.

curl https://api.inferenceapis.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $INFERENCE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash",
    "messages": [
      {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
      {"role": "user", "content": "Hello! What can you do?"}
    ]
  }'

import os
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.inferenceapis.com/v1",
    api_key=os.environ["INFERENCE_API_KEY"],
)
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash",
    messages=[
        {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
        {"role": "user", "content": "Hello! What can you do?"},
    ],
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

import OpenAI from "openai";

const client = new OpenAI({
  baseURL: "https://api.inferenceapis.com/v1",
  apiKey: process.env.INFERENCE_API_KEY,
});
const response = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: "deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash",
  messages: [
    { role: "system", content: "You are a helpful assistant." },
    { role: "user", content: "Hello! What can you do?" },
  ],
});
console.log(response.choices[0].message.content);

External prices and limits come from the linked provider pages and were verified on 2026-09-16. Spotted a change? Tell us.