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DeepSeek V4 Pro at 75% off until 31 May
- ern 6mo agoA few days ago we were hearing about how the "free lunch is over", now we're seeing discounts and increased usage limits.
- ttul 6mo ago* from Chinese labs
- splatzone 6mo agoWhat advantage do you think they have?
- ralph84 6mo agoOperating in a jurisdiction where US companies can't sue them.
- cogman10 6mo agoA sane government policy that invests heavily on innovative businesses.
- junofan 6mo agoI’m not happy with their privacy policy [1]. I’m unfamiliar with the phrase “Parties with Other Legal Rights”. Given the well-documented struggles of Anthropic and others to provide enough compute, I wonder if “Parties with Other Legal Rights” constitutes part of the advantage here. [1]: https://cdn.deepseek.com/policies/en-US/deepseek-privacy-policy.html?locale=en_US https://cdn.deepseek.com/policies/en-US/deepseek-privacy-pol...
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoJust run a local model or run deepseek from another provider with a policy you like. The models are open weight and widely available. Still cheaper than chatgpt and anything else through 3rd parties
- yehosef 6mo agothis is the pitch - it's open source, run it yourself. But >99% of people will not have the hardware needed to run these models at a high enough quality to be close to SOTA. So they will run the open-source models on CCP systems for a good price.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoWhat I mean is you can use providers who also host deepseek models for pennies without touching deepseek itself.
- iosjunkie 6mo agoI’m only seeing 3x the cost of DeepSeek for other providers on Open Router. Is there a better place to look?
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoI haven't really had this issue but deepinfra claims to have us servers and looks pretty cheap to me.
- serf 6mo agoa lack of existential threat in the form of pay-seeking and remediation from the people you stole training materials from that allows for an intrinsically different pace of operation than the Western competition
- niobe 6mo agoThis is clearly a well-timed loss-leading strategic market share grab! Anthropic have blown a lot of user trust in the last couple of months.. But, overall, the current AI pricing is completely unsustainable, across all AI companies, except via the exponential growth they are relying on. Dylan Patel did the most insightful analysis of this I've come across.. https://youtu.be/mDG_Hx3BSUE?si=nyJu4adwYCH1igbJ https://youtu.be/mDG_Hx3BSUE?si=nyJu4adwYCH1igbJ
- sidrag22 6mo agoReally feel like the current versions are for sure "good enough". Thats not how market capture is gonna function though and they are gonna keep pushing because the only moat is to stay ahead, so the problems gonna stay strange. at some point more compute isn't a reasonable answer, and optimization is, and my feeling is we are well past that point from a product perspective, but ipos etc etc
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoThe only moat is the us trying to buy all the compute hardware in the world for the next two years. Then China, amd, etc are just making their own chips.
- Bromeo 6mo agoDeepSeek claims that they can run inference on Huawei chips. Not sure about training.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoIf not now then definitely soon enough
- niobe 6mo agoSo I think the current generation of models are arguably all about the same in terms of capability. However, the requirement for exponential growth I mentioned is all about the economics. AI companies are trying to ride a growth wave where the income curve lags the expense curve by 1-2 years, and at the same time investing 10x their historical income on next year's projected demand. Everyone is selling their API calls at a loss, because to capture the investment required to scale the business up and the costs down, you need to grow your market now (in relative and absolute terms). And history shows, that in big tech you often have winner-takes-all situations, or, at least a couple of big firms will dominate, and the others will die. That's where market share becomes a key strategic goal. But to secure that, they also need to be building next year's compute now. And if their anticipated compute needs are 10x this year, they've got a serious funding problem, one that can only be filled by capital with an appropriate risk appetite. You can only get this high-risk capital when the potential payoff is even more enormous, or, when it's a smaller bite of a much bigger pie. Hence, MS putting into OpenAI and so on. But the investment needs are getting so big we are starting to see some pullback from more conservative sources, but also record deals from others. Now say an AI company does get the capital they need to grow. Well, they've still got a very serious supply problem. RAM, GPUs, water, electricity etc. Hence why there's a lot of deals and cross-investment going on - everyone is trying to secure resources and lower their overall risk exposure while keeping a foot in every possible door, so they can switch alliances whenever it's expedient, and because collaboration also helps the overall market to grow. This all explains to me why the industry _needs_ the hype. These companies can't exist without it, because the money they need to sink in, in order to even be around in 18 months, far outstrips all reasonable financial practices. So it's capitalism on steroids or nothing. If you believe the AI story, then to that extent, it's rational. But note that nowhere in this scenario does it suggest the actual consumers will be getting a consistent product at a consistent price!!!
- jarym 6mo agoEvery AI vendor is trying to steal marketshare. For now the competition is good!
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoPeople don't understand that deep seek is running a plausibly sustainable business. Like how qwen/Alibaba is.
- flakiness 6mo agoWe're subsidized by the Chinese government! https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/deepseek-nears-45-billion-valuation-chinas-big-fund-leads-investment-talks-ft-2026-05-06/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/deepseek-nears-45...
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoCool go download qwen 3.6 and run it on a single GPU and you can avoid paying into a subsidized model
- serf 6mo agowhy are we pretending these are equivalents? yes, single gpu open models exist. Now show me the one that can keep up with a SOTA api model on more than short code block evals.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoQwen 3.6 supports reasonable agentic programming. People are vibe coding with it. It's really not that far off. If you truly cannot make a model that was SOTA 6-12 months ago work for you today for free I don't want to know what your needs are.
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- mattas 6mo agoI can't figure out how there's both too little supply (so a dramatic need for more data centers) but also too little demand (so labs subsidize inference).
- AlexB138 6mo agoThere isn't too little demand. There is massive demand and many competing companies trying to capture that demand, so they are attempting to make better offers than their competition. Hence subsidy.
- rafram 6mo agoThat, and: - Every competitor is planning for the demand to be much higher in a few years than it is now, and aiming to capture as much of that as they can, which starts by getting companies hooked on their models now - The data center capacity will get used no matter who captures the most demand
- croon 6mo agoI can somewhat understand companies getting users depentant on their harnesses or workflow, but model vendors as in this deepseek case, I have absolutely 0 model loyalty when it's a simple config change away, and will always optimize for either capability or price (or whatever !/$ metric you can determine).
- HWR_14 6mo agoI'm guessing there was a pullback in usage as the free lunch started ending. So we get some more subsidized usage.
- dominotw 6mo agothere will be free lunch till they admit to themselves that there is no moat. Acquring customers at huge costs is a fools errand when models are mostly indisguishable. Anthropic is learning that lesson now. Doesnt help that their ceo goes around antognozing everyone by claiming jobs are over and annoying boris does like 500 podcasts per week repeating "coding is solved"
- mannanj 6mo agoFree lunch? More like "free data". The fools who give their life data and most intimate Intellectual property over to the AI companies for free, yes that's a free lunch that won't be subsidized for much longer when the cost on them which has been unsustainable (their data being harvested for non-training purposes) come stop catch up with them. Sincerely, - I see you AI companies harvesting our data giving us discounted subscriptions so we can not realize we are paying you to take our own data!
- dyauspitr 6mo agoThey need to build data centers and lots of them everywhere, preferably powered with renewable energy. Let the tokens flow like water. The models are finally getting to the point where the LLM just knows what you’re asking for and gives it to you.
- yehosef 6mo agoIs anyone concerned about these services and China’s National Intelligence Law?
- missedthecue 6mo agoNot for my purposes tbh. Enjoy my shitty javascript, Xi.
- brcmthrowaway 6mo agoShould be TypeScript
- martin_henk 6mo agoyes. imagine getting denied at the border or something because of data you shared with deep seek,WeChat or any other china centric service
- junofan 6mo agoDefinitely would select the frowny face if that happened.
- dylan604 6mo agoMight as well answer yes to the "are you a subversive" question
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoAre you actually planning on travelling out of the country right now? It's probably not a good idea even if you don't use Chinese products, which by the way you definitely do.
- dylan604 6mo agoThe people that travel out of the country are typically not the same ones aligned with the current administration. The vast majority of the MAGA base are more likely to not have a passport, while a large portion have probably never left their state.
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- wxw 6mo agoPer 1M tokens (input cache hit / input cache miss / output) v4-pro (75% off): $0.003625 / $0.435 / $0.87 v4-pro (regular): $0.0145 / $1.74 / $3.48 v4-flash: $0.0028 / $0.14 / $0.28 that is damn cheap.
- yehosef 6mo agoYou are the product. The book is called "So long, and thanks for all the secrets"
- wanderlust123 6mo agoYou are the product whenever you are sending your data to an LLM not controlled by you. Nothing specific to Deepseek.
- jack_pp 6mo agoGenerous of you to think I'm doing top secret coding and not just another cat website
- niobe 6mo agoWhat if I told you.. this was no different to every US company
- croon 6mo agoThere is not a single LLM provider I trust enough to send secrets to. If you firewall accordingly the provider (or local) can be interchangable, barring capability differences of course. I also struggle to find a provider that can credibly convince me I wouldn't be a product for when using. Have you found one?
- deevus 6mo agoI've been using DeepSeek V4 a lot in the last week and I am very happy with it. If you have a really gnarly bug, you might need a SOTA model like Opus. For most things it is very very good, and costs significantly less (even without the discount). I've been using it as part of a complex DOS game decompilation project[0]. I'm working on refactoring the software rendering pipeline so that we can add GPU rendering. The hardest part of this so far is converting the 90's polygon rendering from screen to world space. It spun its wheels a few times doing a large mostly mechanical change. After resetting and improving my prompts it was able to get through it. I'm using Matt Pocock's skills[1] for this work, which has been quite nice. [0]: https://github.com/FatalDecomp/ROLLER https://github.com/FatalDecomp/ROLLER [1]: https://github.com/mattpocock/skills https://github.com/mattpocock/skills
- doctoboggan 6mo agoWhat agentic harness do you use deepseek with?
- deevus 6mo agoI'm using Pi: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/coding-agent https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...
- samdhar 6mo agoCached input at $0.003625/M, output at $0.435/M. Aggressive pricing. For anyone doing the "should I self-host on rented GPUs?" math: at this rate you'd need to push roughly 1B output tokens/day to break even against an 8xH100 fleet on Vast/Lambda (assuming 3-5k tokens/sec aggregate throughput). The vast majority of "I should run my own LLM" use cases don't come close to that volume. Every API price drop kills another tranche of "self-host the open model" use cases. The implied bet: even if regular pricing ($1.74/M output) is also subsidized, exponential demand growth eventually makes the unit economics work. We'll see.
- WatchDog 6mo agoWhat coding agent(ideally CLI) have people found works well with this? Occasionally I go and try different agents with openrouter models, but nothing seems to really get close to the proprietary ones like claude-code.
- flakiness 6mo agoPi (pi.dev) is fine. I'm using it with DS v4 right now. It's not close to Claude code but I think that's the point. By the way OpenRouter version is very slow for some reason. DeepSeek platform is faster (and cheaper with the discount) if you don't mind passing the credit card number / email to this company.
- croon 6mo agoAs sibling said, Pi is great, and you can absolutely run it directly (there's even a plugin to use itself as a sub agent), but I mainly run it as a sub agent from other harnesses, for example running a more capable model in copilot, and then delegating simpler chunks to pi (using a cheaper model) as the sub agent. I've tried gas town and some others but never got into that way of working. I'm going to try opencode though as a less vendor specific harness than copilot/claude/gemini.
- speu 6mo agoI've been using OpenCode for a few days now, I like it. It doesn't feel any "less heavy" than Claude Code (they're both massive piles of vibe-coded typescript) but for me it's essentially a 1:1 replacement for Claude Code. Sidenote, I've been trying deepseek-v4-flash and I'm blown away. It's no Opus, but it's as cheap as tap water and punches far above its weight as a Flash model. I keep throwing tasks at it out of curiosity and it keeps solving them.
- grovel4brown 6mo agolmao i can pay them to steal my ideas and code
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- EEnsw3r 6mo agoI find it hard to understand why nobody in this thread considers that the current pricing might still be below cost. The discount was supposed to end on May 5, and then shortly after that they extended it to May 31. They clearly made a judgment call there, rather than treating it as a desperate loss-leader. If you have actually used DeepSeek, you would notice that the cache-hit rate is extremely high, and the cache invalidation window is much longer than every other provider's. That suggests DeepSeek is simply much better at utilizing its infrastructure than other vendors. I am also highly skeptical that the average user's input is worth more than the API cost of processing it. Do people really think DeepSeek researchers enjoy panning for gold in a river of boilerplate and half-baked code?
- zozbot234 6mo agoDeepSeek's KV cache is tiny compared to other open weight models. This actually makes very large inference batches viable even on consumer hardware, even when resorting to SSD offload for weights. Once support is added to the main inference frameworks, it should be an absolute game changer for SOTA local inference.
- pupppet 6mo agoHave any regular Opus users taken V4 for a spin? What’s your take?
- binary132 6mo agoAnecdatally, out of all the popular LLMs I’ve only found Gemini to be any use for entry-level Ford Power Stroke Diesel mechanics and diagnostics. :)
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- wilsonwu95 5mo agoSo far with good harnessing (Claude Code) I feel it is extreme cost efficient to produce quality output. Also integration is very smooth. Looks like Claude Code has not limit its connection with DeepSeek.