TokelyTHE SHORT ANSWER
The cheapest route to DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.3 or Kimi K3 depends on the exact model, cached-input share and service conditions. DeepSeek’s peak and off-peak rates can change the answer by time of day. Compare each model with itself before comparing different families, because a cheaper model is not necessarily an equivalent replacement.
Prices checked October 15, 2026. Amounts below are USD per million tokens, excluding taxes and unrelated platform fees. Tokely figures are published standard-route rates; route selection can affect charges.
How much does DeepSeek V4 Pro cost?
DeepSeek lists V4 Pro at $0.66 uncached input and $1.98 output off-peak, or $1.32 input and $3.96 output at peak. Cache-hit rates are $0.022 and $0.044 respectively. The developer documents the peak schedule on its official pricing page.
Tokely publishes $0.88 input, $2.64 output and $0.03 cache-read pricing for DeepSeek V4 Pro.
For 1 million uncached input tokens plus 250,000 output tokens, direct off-peak access costs $1.155; Tokely’s published rate gives $1.54; direct peak access costs $2.31. The arithmetic makes the tradeoff clear: Tokely is cheaper than the direct peak rate in this example and more expensive than the direct off-peak rate. These are price calculations, not latency or quality measurements.
How much does GLM 5.3 cost?
Z.AI lists GLM-5.3 at $1.40 input, $0.26 cached input and $4.40 output. GLM-5.3-Flash is a separate model priced at $0.15 input and $0.50 output. Do not treat a Flash quote as the price of full GLM-5.3. Z.AI pricing.
At the full GLM-5.3 rates, the same uncached workload costs $2.50. This is the verified direct-provider baseline; it is not evidence that GLM-5.3 is currently callable through Tokely.
How should you compare Kimi K3?
Tokely publishes Kimi K3 at $2.70 input, $13.50 output and $0.27 cache reads, giving $6.075 for the same uncached workload. Tokely Kimi K3 pricing.
Kimi’s official billing documentation distinguishes cache writes and reads for K3. The accessible official text did not provide a complete numerical tariff for this comparison, so this article does not declare Tokely the cheapest K3 provider or attach an unverified direct-price saving.
Which route should you choose?
First eliminate routes that lack the required model version, tools or context capacity. Then calculate the bill with your own token mix. For scheduled jobs, include time-dependent rates. For interactive agents, include cache writes, retries and total completion time.
Use Tokely’s calculator for an initial estimate and recheck the linked tariffs before committing production traffic.