Skip to main content
AIpricly

Llama 4 Maverick vs DeepSeek V3.5

Side-by-side pricing, capabilities, real-world cost across common scenarios, and our editorial pick.

Add a modelUp to 4 models can be compared
all prices in USD per 1M tokens

Llama 4 Maverick

Meta · released 2026-01-25

Quality (AA Index)80
Input price$0.50
Output price$1.50
Context256K
Throughput220 tok/s
P50 latency0.5s
OVERALL WINNER

DeepSeek V3.5

DeepSeek · released 2025-12-01

Quality (AA Index)81
Input price$0.14
Output price$0.28
Context128K
Throughput95 tok/s
P50 latency1.5s

Links open in a new tab via our OpenRouter referral. Affiliate disclosure

Head-to-head specs

Green column = winner per metric
MetricLlama 4 MaverickDeepSeek V3.5Verdict
Input price
/1M tokens
$0.50$0.14DeepSeek V3.5 −72%
Output price
/1M tokens
$1.50$0.28DeepSeek V3.5 −81%
Context window
max input length
256K128KLlama 4 Maverick +2.0×
AA Quality
AA Intelligence Index (0–100)
8081DeepSeek V3.5 +1pt
Arena Elo
LMArena human-pref Elo (800–2000)
Tied
Throughput
tokens per second
22095Llama 4 Maverick +132%
P50 latency
first token
0.5s1.5sLlama 4 Maverick −67%
Vision
multimodal
Function calling
tool use
Tied
Reasoning mode
chain-of-thought
Tied

Monthly cost across common scenarios

Default usage assumptions
ScenarioLlama 4 MaverickDeepSeek V3.5
customer support
1000K req · 600/180 tok
$570$134
chat with docs
300K req · 4000/300 tok
$735$193
code generation
500K req · 2000/500 tok
$875$210
voice assistant
600K req · 800/200 tok
$420$101
Our pick

For most workloads, choose DeepSeek V3.5.

  • 72% cheaper input price, which compounds at scale

Roughly GPT-4o-class quality at roughly 90% off. Tradeoff is region availability (Chinese provider) and slower output throughput than Western frontier tiers.

Choose Llama 4 Maverick instead if: Best open-weight alternative for self-hosted deployments. Quality lags closed-source frontier but cost-per-token via inference providers is the lowest in the table.

Read our deep analysis

Why pick? Use both with smart routing

Phase 2 · gateway with fallback chain

Set DeepSeek V3.5 as primary, Llama 4 Maverick as fallback. One key, one bill, automatic failover when DeepSeek V3.5 errors.

PHASE 2 PREVIEW · gateway not live yetThis endpoint does not exist yet. The gateway is in Phase 2 — what you see below is a design preview of the planned interface, not a live API. We will email subscribers when it launches.
Preview the planned API call
$ curl https://api.aipricly.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AIPC_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "routing": {
      "primary": "deepseek/deepseek-v3-5",
      "fallback": ["meta/llama-4-maverick"]
    },
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "..."}]
  }'

Related comparisons