DeepSeek V3 vs Yi-Lightning: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Name: DeepSeek V3 vs Yi-Lightning — Pricing, Benchmarks & Speed Comparison 2026
Creator: LLMversus
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Pricing verified Aug 3, 2026By LLMversusUpdated August 8, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

Compare DeepSeek V3 and Yi-Lightning across pricing, benchmarks, and capabilities.

Updated: August 3, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	DeepSeek V3	Yi-Lightning
Provider	DeepSeek	01.AI
Input Price / 1M tokens	$0.269	$0.140
Output Price / 1M tokens	$0.400	$0.140
Context Window	128K	16K
Max Output Tokens	8,192	4,096
Arena ELO	1,359	1,165
Coding ELO	1,359	1,170
TTFT (ms)	220	150
Tokens/sec	85	100
Multimodal	No	No
JSON Mode	Yes	Yes
Function Calling	Yes	Yes
Vision	No	No

When to Use DeepSeek V3

DeepSeek V3 excels at coding, general-purpose, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks.

Strengths:

Excellent coding performance for its price
Open-source and self-hostable
Very competitive benchmarks
Extremely affordable

Best for:

codinggeneral-purposecost-sensitiveopen-source

When to Use Yi-Lightning

Yi-Lightning excels at cost-effective, fast-inference tasks.

Strengths:

Very cheap
Very fast
Good quality

Best for:

cost-effectivefast-inference

DeepSeek V3 vs Yi-Lightning: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Side-by-Side Comparison

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