DeepSeek Flash: review and tests from Russia

• What it is. DeepSeek’s fast, low-cost model: a 1M-token context, image input, function calling, and it thinks before answering by default.
• Quality. By DeepSeek’s numbers, version 1017 beats Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on fixing bugs in real code (DeepSWE). Opus 5 is still ahead on terminal work and on building a whole project. Independent ranking Artificial Analysis gives it 45 points, more than DeepSeek V4 Pro (36).
• Price on RuAPI. Per 1M tokens: $0.168 input, $0.012 cache read, $1.44 output.
• Speed. By our stats the first token arrives in 1.5 s on average. From Moscow without a VPN the first data came in 0.5 s.
• Try it free. New users usually get $0.05 right away — enough for roughly 50 short questions (at 1,000 tokens per question and 600 per answer).

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What changed on 17 October

• scores higher on benchmarks;
• finishes tasks faster;
• gives shorter answers — so you pay for fewer output tokens for the same result.

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Specs

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DeepSeek’s benchmark results

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What independent tests show

• Artificial Analysis — an independent ranking that runs models through its own test suite. Version 1017 (at maximum reasoning) scores 45; DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 scores 36. Through DeepSeek’s API, Flash outputs about 210 tokens per second, and the first chunk of the answer arrives in about 1.1 s. The same page shows that the model thinks a lot: it used 210M output tokens on their tests, against a median of 140M for comparable models.
• Video review on Bilibili (17 October, 11 tasks of the author’s own). Code and complex engineering tasks are clearly better than in the previous version, and it uses about a third fewer tokens. But creative writing in Chinese and basic image recognition got worse, and SVG graphics and knowledge of the 3D world remain weak spots. The author’s verdict: the new version is stronger at code, but not better than the old one at everything.

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What it costs on RuAPI

• Versus gpt-5.4-mini, Flash is 5 times cheaper on input and almost 4 times cheaper on output.
• Versus gemini-2.5-flash — roughly half the price on both input and output.
• Versus claude-haiku-5-5 it depends on request length. On short requests Haiku is cheaper. Once a request with its context goes over 100,000 tokens — and with agents like Cline and Claude Code it almost always does — Flash is 3.5 times cheaper than Haiku on input, and its cache read is 5 times cheaper.
• Versus deepseek-v4-pro — about 9 times cheaper on input and about 3 times cheaper on output.
• Versus claude-sonnet-5-5 — 14 times cheaper on input and about 8 times cheaper on output. What that adds up to over a full day of agent work is in “DeepSeek or Claude”.

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How fast it answers

• Real requests over a week (our server’s stats, 14–20 October): the first meaningful token of the answer arrives in 1.5 s on average. Only about 2.6% of requests waited longer than 3 s.
• From Moscow without a VPN (20 October, a test server in a Moscow data center): the streamed answer started arriving in 0.5 s; an answer of up to 1,000 tokens, reasoning included, arrived in full in 6.8 s.

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When to pick Flash and when another model

• Flash — nearly everything day to day: chat, translation, classification, extracting data from text, reading screenshots, coding agents with a long context.
• deepseek-v4-pro — only if it is clearly better on your own tasks. In the Artificial Analysis ranking, version 1017 beats V4 Pro (45 vs 36) and answers about twice as fast, while costing 3–9 times less. Pro also doesn’t understand images.
• Claude Sonnet or Opus — when a model has to work on its own for a long time: long chains of actions in a terminal, a whole project. That’s where Flash shows the biggest gap in the benchmarks.
• claude-haiku-5-5 — very short requests where every fraction of a cent matters.

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How to connect

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    api_key="YOUR_RUAPI_KEY",
    base_url="https://www.ruapi.ai/v1",
)

resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="deepseek-flash",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain what this function does and suggest tests"}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

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Try it free

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Sources

• DeepSeek, API changelog and update announcement, 17 October 2026 — version 1017, the deepseek-flash name, unchanged price.
• DeepSeek, model card on Hugging Face — benchmark table, license.
• DeepSeek, models and pricing — context, max answer length, features.
• Artificial Analysis, model page and DeepSeek models — rating, speed, token use; as of 20 October 2026.
• Video review on Bilibili, 17 October 2026 — 11 hands-on tasks.
• RuAPI prices — pricing page, as of 20 October 2026.