# DeepSeek vs Fireworks AI

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/deepseek-vs-fireworks/

Every value below is read from DeepSeek's and Fireworks AI's own documentation. See https://inetgeek.com/methodology/ for how.

## At a glance

| Criterion | DeepSeek | Fireworks AI |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Pricing model | Per million tokens, with every rate doubling at peak: off-peak is half price, and peak is 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC on weekdays. Cache hits are priced roughly 30x below cache misses. | Three products on one bill. Serverless inference is per token, per model. Fine-tuning is per million TRAINING tokens by parameter band — $0.50 for models up to 16B, $10.00 above 300B. Dedicated GPUs are hourly: $7.00 for an H100 or H200, $10.00 for a B200. |
| Input price, top model | $1.32 per million input tokens for deepseek-v4-pro at peak on a cache miss, halving to $0.66 off-peak. A cache hit is $0.044 peak. | $3.00 per million input tokens for Kimi K3, the most expensive model in its serverless catalogue. Fireworks hosts other labs' open-weight models rather than its own, so "flagship" here means the top of what it serves. |
| Output price, top model | $3.96 per million output tokens for deepseek-v4-pro at peak, $1.98 off-peak. | $15.00 per million output tokens for Kimi K3. |
| Input price, cheapest model | $0.44 per million input tokens for deepseek-v4-flash at peak on a cache miss, $0.22 off-peak, with output at $1.32 peak. | $0.15 per million input tokens for GLM 5.3 Flash, with output at $0.50. DeepSeek-V4-Flash is $0.22 in and $0.66 out — the same model DeepSeek itself sells at $0.44 peak. |
| Context window | 1M tokens on every model in the current line. | 1,048,576 tokens on Kimi K3, GLM 5.3 and both DeepSeek V4 variants; 262,144 on Qwen3.8 and 131,072 on Muse Glimmer 30B. The window is the model's, not Fireworks'. |
| Max output tokens | 384K tokens maximum. | No separate output cap. max_tokens is bounded by the model's context length — prompt plus completion must fit inside it — and what happens on overflow is set by context_length_exceeded_behavior rather than a fixed ceiling. |
| Prompt caching | Supported | Supported |

## Where they differ

### Pricing model

- DeepSeek: Per million tokens, with every rate doubling at peak: off-peak is half price, and peak is 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC on weekdays. Cache hits are priced roughly 30x below cache misses. ([source](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing))
- Fireworks AI: Three products on one bill. Serverless inference is per token, per model. Fine-tuning is per million TRAINING tokens by parameter band — $0.50 for models up to 16B, $10.00 above 300B. Dedicated GPUs are hourly: $7.00 for an H100 or H200, $10.00 for a B200. ([source](https://fireworks.ai/pricing))

### Input price, top model

- DeepSeek: $1.32 per million input tokens for deepseek-v4-pro at peak on a cache miss, halving to $0.66 off-peak. A cache hit is $0.044 peak. ([source](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing))
- Fireworks AI: $3.00 per million input tokens for Kimi K3, the most expensive model in its serverless catalogue. Fireworks hosts other labs' open-weight models rather than its own, so "flagship" here means the top of what it serves. ([source](https://fireworks.ai/models))

### Output price, top model

- DeepSeek: $3.96 per million output tokens for deepseek-v4-pro at peak, $1.98 off-peak. ([source](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing))
- Fireworks AI: $15.00 per million output tokens for Kimi K3. ([source](https://fireworks.ai/models))

### Input price, cheapest model

- DeepSeek: $0.44 per million input tokens for deepseek-v4-flash at peak on a cache miss, $0.22 off-peak, with output at $1.32 peak. ([source](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing))
- Fireworks AI: $0.15 per million input tokens for GLM 5.3 Flash, with output at $0.50. DeepSeek-V4-Flash is $0.22 in and $0.66 out — the same model DeepSeek itself sells at $0.44 peak. ([source](https://fireworks.ai/models))

### Context window

- DeepSeek: 1M tokens on every model in the current line. ([source](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing))
- Fireworks AI: 1,048,576 tokens on Kimi K3, GLM 5.3 and both DeepSeek V4 variants; 262,144 on Qwen3.8 and 131,072 on Muse Glimmer 30B. The window is the model's, not Fireworks'. ([source](https://fireworks.ai/models))

### Max output tokens

- DeepSeek: 384K tokens maximum. ([source](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing))
- Fireworks AI: No separate output cap. max_tokens is bounded by the model's context length — prompt plus completion must fit inside it — and what happens on overflow is set by context_length_exceeded_behavior rather than a fixed ceiling. ([source](https://fireworks.ai/docs/api-reference/post-chatcompletions))

## Which should you choose?

Pick DeepSeek if Batch-shaped work that can run outside weekday mornings UTC, where off-peak halves an already low rate and a cache hit costs about 3% of a cache miss.

Pick Fireworks AI if Running open-weight models without operating GPUs — the same DeepSeek and Qwen checkpoints the labs publish, served per token, with a path to dedicated hardware if throughput demands it.

Consider something else: DeepSeek — Capacity is expressed as concurrent requests rather than tokens per minute, which is a different thing to plan against, and the peak window lands on European working hours.

Consider something else: Fireworks AI — You want a frontier proprietary model: Fireworks serves other people's open weights, so the ceiling is whatever the open ecosystem has released.

## Documented by only one

- Free tier: Fireworks AI: Yes
- Rate limits: DeepSeek: Concurrency rather than requests per minute: 500 concurrent requests on deepseek-v4-pro and 2,500 on deepseek-v4-flash, per account rather than per key. Exceeding it returns HTTP 429, and expansion is free on request.
- H100 SXM, per GPU-hour: Fireworks AI: $7.00 per hour for an H100 80GB on demand, or $8.00 on the shorter commitment shown beside it. The same rate applies to an H200 141GB.
- Largest GPU offered: Fireworks AI: 180GB per GPU on a B200, at $10.00 an hour on demand.

## Questions this comparison answers

**Should I choose DeepSeek or Fireworks AI?**

Pick DeepSeek if Batch-shaped work that can run outside weekday mornings UTC, where off-peak halves an already low rate and a cache hit costs about 3% of a cache miss.
Pick Fireworks AI if Running open-weight models without operating GPUs — the same DeepSeek and Qwen checkpoints the labs publish, served per token, with a path to dedicated hardware if throughput demands it.