Dev.to
7/15/2026
Comparing DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, and GLM on price and quality for freelance AI workloads
Original: DeepSeek vs Qwen vs Kimi vs GLM: Which One Wins My Freelance Budget?
Short summary
A freelance developer compares four Chinese AI model families—DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, and GLM—against GPT-4o for real client workloads, finding DeepSeek V4 Flash at $0.25/M output tokens delivers near-equivalent quality at 2.4x lower cost. The comparison covers pricing, code quality, language support, reasoning, speed, and multimodal capabilities across all four families. DeepSeek emerges as the daily driver for English summarization and code generation, while Qwen wins on bottom-end pricing and Kimi leads in reasoning and Chinese-language tasks.
- •DeepSeek V4 Flash at $0.25/M output tokens is 2.4x cheaper than GPT-4o with comparable quality for summarization
- •Qwen3-8B and GLM-4-9B are cheapest at $0.01/M but trade off on English quality
- •All four families offer OpenAI-compatible APIs with 128K context windows
Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.
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