Last updated: Q1 2026. All output token prices are quoted in USD per million tokens (USD/MTok). Rumored model pricing is clearly marked and should not be treated as a binding quote.
I spent the last two weeks routing the same 10M-token bilingual customer-support workload through four endpoints exposed by the HolySheep AI relay (Sign up here for free signup credits). My goal was simple: figure out where the rumored DeepSeek V4 and GPT-5.5 will actually land on the price-versus-quality curve once they ship, and which workloads should pre-commit to which vendor today. The headline number, a rumored 71x output token spread between DeepSeek V4 and GPT-5.5, turned out to be both real and avoidable if you know how to design around it.
The verified 2026 pricing baseline (shipping today)
| Model | Input USD/MTok | Output USD/MTok | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-4.1 (OpenAI) | $3.00 | $8.00 | Verified, shipping |
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Anthropic) | $3.00 | $15.00 | Verified, shipping |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash (Google) | $0.15 | $2.50 | Verified, shipping |
| DeepSeek V3.2 (DeepSeek) | $0.27 | $0.42 | Verified, shipping |
Source: published vendor pricing pages, snapshot Q1 2026. These four data points anchor every routing decision in the rest of this article.
Rumored DeepSeek V4 and GPT-5.5 pricing
Based on community signal (GitHub issues, Reddit threads on r/LocalLLaMA, and analyst notes circulating on Hacker News in late 2025), the two next-generation flagships are widely expected to land in these bands:
| Model | Rumored Input USD/MTok | Rumored Output USD/MTok | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4 | $0.18 – $0.28 | $0.40 – $0.45 | High (consistent with V3.2 trajectory) |
| GPT-5.5 | $5.00 – $7.00 | $25.00 – $32.00 | Medium (OpenAI has not confirmed) |
DeepSeek V3.2 already outputs at $0.42/MTok, and V4 is widely expected to hold or slightly undercut that band. GPT-5.5, by contrast, is rumored to follow OpenAI's "premium flagship" tier with output around $30/MTok. Whether OpenAI ships at $25 or $32, the gap stays the same order of magnitude.
The 71x output token spread
Take the upper bound of the GPT-5.5 rumor ($30/MTok) and the lower bound of the V4 rumor ($0.42/MTok) and you get:
$30.00 / $0.42 = 71.4x output token spread