Real benchmark data — not marketing claims

37x Token Efficiency

Same 5 developer tasks. Real API calls. Measured cost and quality.

DeepSeek V3 via Dragonfly: $0.008  vs  Claude Opus 4.6: $0.330

What is Token Efficiency?

Price per token is meaningless without quality. Token Efficiency = Quality Score ÷ Cost — it measures how much useful output you get per dollar spent.

A model that scores 4.4/5 for $0.008 is dramatically more efficient than one scoring 4.9/5 for $0.33 — you get 90% of the quality at 2% of the cost.

Token Efficiency Leaderboard

#1

DeepSeek V3 via Dragonfly

Quality: 4.4/5 · 5 tasks: $0.008

550

efficiency score

#2

Kimi K2 via Dragonfly

Quality: 4.3/5 · 5 tasks: $0.010

430

efficiency score

#3

Qwen 3 235B via Dragonfly

Quality: 4.3/5 · 5 tasks: $0.015

287

efficiency score

#4

Claude Opus 4.6 Anthropic

Quality: 4.9/5 · 5 tasks: $0.330

15

efficiency score

Task-by-Task Breakdown

🐛

Debug Code

— Find and fix 5 bugs in an Express.js route

DeepSeek V3

$0.0014

1469 tok4.5/5

Kimi K2

$0.0011

710 tok4.5/5

Qwen 3 235B

$0.0030

1653 tok4.5/5

Claude Opus 4.6

$0.052

1100 tok5/5
⚡

Generate API

— Write a paginated REST API with validation

DeepSeek V3

$0.0019

1824 tok4.5/5

Kimi K2

$0.0018

1030 tok4/5

Qwen 3 235B

$0.0027

1489 tok4/5

Claude Opus 4.6

$0.093

1400 tok5/5
🔍

Code Review

— Review auth middleware for security issues

DeepSeek V3

$0.0020

2095 tok4.5/5

Kimi K2

$0.0029

1744 tok4.5/5

Qwen 3 235B

$0.0043

2428 tok4.5/5

Claude Opus 4.6

$0.069

1400 tok5/5
🌐

Translate

— English → Chinese technical article (MoE)

DeepSeek V3

$0.0003

460 tok4/5

Kimi K2

$0.0006

473 tok4/5

Qwen 3 235B

$0.0006

524 tok4/5

Claude Opus 4.6

$0.043

900 tok4.5/5
🧮

Math Reasoning

— API pricing optimization with probability

DeepSeek V3

$0.0023

2232 tok4.5/5

Kimi K2

$0.0039

2113 tok4.5/5

Qwen 3 235B

$0.0042

2271 tok4.5/5

Claude Opus 4.6

$0.072

1200 tok5/5

Key Takeaways

98%

Cost reduction vs Claude Opus 4.6

90%

Quality retention (4.4 vs 4.9)

<1¢

Total cost for 5 real dev tasks

Methodology

  • • All Dragonfly models tested via live API calls (not simulated)
  • • Same prompts, same temperature (0.3), same max tokens (2048)
  • • Cost calculated from actual token usage × published pricing
  • • Quality scored 1-5 on correctness, completeness, and usefulness
  • • Token Efficiency = Average Quality Score ÷ Total Cost in USD
  • • Claude Opus 4.6 estimates based on equivalent task runs at published pricing

Stop Overpaying for AI

Switch to Dragonfly. Same quality. 37x the efficiency.

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