I’ve been using AI tools for studying since sophomore year, and when DeepSeek V4 dropped last month I immediately needed to know if it was actually worth switching from ChatGPT. Spoiler: for students specifically, the answer is yes — but with caveats that nobody’s talking about. 💰 Actual Pricing (May 2026, verified) MODEL INPUT/1M OUTPUT/1M VERDICT DeepSeek V4-Flash $0.14 $0.28 🟢 Best for students DeepSeek V4-Pro $1.74 $3.48 🟢 Open source GPT-5.5 $5.00 $30.00 🔴 2x price hike Apr 2026 GPT-5.5 Pro $30.00 $180.00 🔴 Enterprise only ⚔️** The Honest Debat e 🟢 **PRO DeepSeek →V4-Flash at $0.14/1M input — effectively free for student workloads →MIT license — download it, run it, own it →93.5 LiveCodeBench — best coding score of any public model right now →1M token context — paste your entire semester’s notes in one go 🔴 PRO GPT-5.5 →Native multimodal — scan your handwritten notes, analyze diagrams →ChatGPT interface most students already know and use →Plugin ecosystem — Wolfram, code interpreter, browsing all built in →Data stays in US servers — safer for sensitive school accounts 🎓 My actual student verdict For text-heavy study tasks — summarizing papers, generating flashcards, outlining essays, planning your week — DeepSeek V4-Flash wins on cost by a factor that’s almost embarrassing. $0.14/M input means you can run 500 study sessions for what one GPT-5.5 session costs. For multimodal work — scanning handwritten notes, analyzing charts from textbooks, voice-to-text study sessions — GPT-5.5 still has the edge. If you’re a STEM student working with a lot of diagrams, it matters… submitted by /u/Ok-Drama-6800
Originally posted by u/Ok-Drama-6800 on r/ArtificialInteligence