I compared free o3 mini vs Deepseek R1 (on their website) and in my tests o3 performed better every time (did some coding tests)

The model looks quite a bit better in the benchmarks so unless they overfit the model on them it would probably perform better than deepseek.

My vibe question checking suggests otherwise. Even o3-mini-high is not as good as r1, even though it's faster than r1. Considering o3-mini is more expensive per token. It's not clear o3-mini-high is cheaper than r1 either even r1 probably consumes more token per answer.

well in my anecdotal tests, o3 mini (free) performed better than r1

Also in my coding testing o3 mini (free) is better than r1.

I did math tests. Probably you did coding.