// head_to_head
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 vs Ministral 3 3B 2512
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.
Ministral 3 3B 2512 is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here.
Ministral 3 3B 2512 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 Flash 0731
- Blended / 1M
- $0.190
- Context
- 1.3M
- Released
- Jul 31, 2026
- Overall score
- 74.2
mistralai
Ministral 3 3B 2512
- Blended / 1M
- $0.100
- Context
- 131K
- Released
- Dec 2, 2025
- Overall score
- Not evaluated
Specs and pricing
| Metric | DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 | Ministral 3 3B 2512 |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 74.2 | — |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.0356 | — |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $0.190 | $0.100win |
| Input price / 1M | $0.040win | $0.100 |
| Output price / 1M | $0.640 | $0.100win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.016 | $0.010win |
| Context window | 1.3Mwin | 131K |
| Max output tokens | 944Kwin | 105K |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 on top, Ministral 3 3B 2512 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 Flash 0731 | Ministral 3 3B 2512 |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $59.07/mo | $25.52/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $60.80/mo | $50.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $69.76/mo | $37.60/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $86.80/mo | $103.00/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $152.00/mo | $215.00/mo |
Which should you pick?
You need to fit large documents in one call
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731
Wider context window — 1.3M against 131K.
You are cost-constrained
Ministral 3 3B 2512
Cheaper on blended list price at $0.100 per million tokens.
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 vs Ministral 3 3B 2512 FAQ
Which is better, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 or Ministral 3 3B 2512?
Ministral 3 3B 2512 is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here. Ministral 3 3B 2512 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 Flash 0731 cheaper than Ministral 3 3B 2512?
Ministral 3 3B 2512 is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 lists at $0.190 per million tokens and Ministral 3 3B 2512 at $0.100 — Ministral 3 3B 2512 is 1.9× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 charges $0.040 in and $0.640 out, Ministral 3 3B 2512 charges $0.100 and $0.100 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Does DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 or Ministral 3 3B 2512 have a bigger context window?
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 has the larger context window: 1.3M for DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 against 131K for Ministral 3 3B 2512. 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 Flash 0731 and Ministral 3 3B 2512 support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.016 per million for DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 and $0.010 for Ministral 3 3B 2512, against full input rates of $0.040 and $0.100. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.
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.