As of August 30, 2026, LFM2.5-2.6B is 99% cheaper per million tokens than DeepSeek VL2. DeepSeek VL2 is $0.30 / $2.50 per million input/output tokens versus LFM2.5-2.6B at $0.02 / $0.02. Sources: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing and https://www.liquid.ai
Sources: DeepSeek API pricing (https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing); Liquid AI pricing (https://www.liquid.ai)
DeepSeek VL2
DeepSeek
Input
$0.30
Output
$2.50
LFM2.5-2.6B
Liquid AI
Input
$0.02
Output
$0.02
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
DeepSeek VL2LFM2.5-2.6BVerdict
Both models are closely matched on benchmarks. LFM2.5-2.6B has the pricing advantage, making it the better value unless DeepSeek VL2's specific capabilities are critical to your workflow.
As of August 30, 2026, LFM2.5-2.6B is 99% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. LFM2.5-2.6B costs $0.02 per million input tokens and $0.02 per million output tokens ($0.04 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). DeepSeek VL2 costs $0.30 / $2.50 per million tokens ($2.80 blended). Sources: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing and https://www.liquid.ai. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
DeepSeek VL2 DeepSeek API pricing is $0.30 input and $2.50 output per million tokens via Replicate. LFM2.5-2.6B Liquid AI API pricing is $0.02 input and $0.02 output per million tokens via Liquid AI. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Neither DeepSeek VL2 nor LFM2.5-2.6B has a published SWE-bench or LiveCodeBench score on this page yet. Use the comparison table for the evals that do exist.
DeepSeek VL2 supports a 129K token context window, while LFM2.5-2.6B supports 66K tokens. DeepSeek VL2 offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
Shared benchmark scores for DeepSeek VL2 and LFM2.5-2.6B are still limited. Check the comparison table for the evals each model has published. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.
Both DeepSeek VL2 and LFM2.5-2.6B are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, LFM2.5-2.6B has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.
Yes. Call DeepSeek VL2 through Replicate and LFM2.5-2.6B through Liquid AI with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.
List rates are the latest published DeepSeek API pricing and Liquid AI API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing and https://www.liquid.ai. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.
DeepSeek VL2 supports up to 129K output tokens per request, while LFM2.5-2.6B supports up to an unspecified number of output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
DeepSeek VL2 has a measured throughput of approximately 22 tokens/second. Throughput data for LFM2.5-2.6B is not yet available. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open DeepSeek VL2 or LFM2.5-2.6B from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
This comparison covers API pricing, context window, throughput, and benchmark scores. DeepSeek VL2 costs $0.30/M input and $2.50/M output via Replicate. LFM2.5-2.6B costs $0.02/M input and $0.02/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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