// head_to_head
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs Gemma 3 12B
Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.
Gemma 3 12B is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here.
Gemma 3 12B does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.
deepseek
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
- Blended / 1M
- $0.200
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Sep 10, 2026
- Overall score
- 81.1
Gemma 3 12B
- Blended / 1M
- $0.075
- Context
- 131K
- Released
- Mar 13, 2025
- Overall score
- Not evaluated
Specs and pricing
| Metric | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | Gemma 3 12B |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 81.1 | — |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.0157 | — |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $0.200 | $0.075win |
| Input price / 1M | $0.100 | $0.050win |
| Output price / 1M | $0.500 | $0.150win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.010 | — |
| Context window | 1.0Mwin | 131K |
| Max output tokens | 944Kwin | 16K |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on top, Gemma 3 12B below, both out of 100.
What each one costs to run
Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.
| Workload | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | Gemma 3 12B |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $57.52/mo | $24.00/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $74.00/mo | $49.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $69.60/mo | $52.00/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $133.00/mo | $61.25/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $255.00/mo | $140.00/mo |
Which should you pick?
You need to fit large documents in one call
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
Wider context window — 1.0M against 131K.
You are cost-constrained
Gemma 3 12B
Cheaper on blended list price at $0.075 per million tokens.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs Gemma 3 12B FAQ
Which is better, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash or Gemma 3 12B?
Gemma 3 12B is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here. Gemma 3 12B does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.
Is DeepSeek V4.1 Flash cheaper than Gemma 3 12B?
Gemma 3 12B is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash lists at $0.200 per million tokens and Gemma 3 12B at $0.075 — Gemma 3 12B is 2.7× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — DeepSeek V4.1 Flash charges $0.100 in and $0.500 out, Gemma 3 12B charges $0.050 and $0.150 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Does DeepSeek V4.1 Flash or Gemma 3 12B have a bigger context window?
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash has the larger context window: 1.0M for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash against 131K for Gemma 3 12B. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.
Do DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Gemma 3 12B support prompt caching?
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash publishes a cached-input rate of $0.010 per million tokens against a full input rate of $0.100. The catalogue lists no separate cached rate for Gemma 3 12B, which means the provider does not price it separately here — not that caching is unavailable.
Related comparisons
How these numbers are produced
- Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-06-25, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
- Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
- “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.
Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.