Well it is a bit surprising that 3.1 flash-lite could be better than deepseek-v4-pro (cheaper output and way cheaper cache so might cost less for quite a few use cases).

They are not anywhere close according to pretty much every benchmark (even v4-flash is considerably ahead and its way cheaper than flash-lite). Maybe tuning prompts/tools/etc. might be useful?

Gemini flash lite family of models currently has the best ratio for price/speed/intelligence for understanding images, no real alternative AFAIK