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DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
> (3) The deepseek-v4-pro model API pricing will be officially adjusted to 1/4 of the original price after the 75% discount promotion ends on 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC.
https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2057854261699195173 https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2057854261699195173
Related ongoing thread:
DeepSeek reasonix, DeepSeek native coding agent with high caching and low cost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256953 - May 2026 (135 comments)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Havoc 5mo agoNeat. I like DS for secondary checks on code. Sometimes spots things other models don't
- Sphax 5mo agoThat is some insane value. I've been using GLM Coding Plan Max with GLM 5.1 for a while and i've tested DeepSeek V4 Pro maybe for 3 weeks now and I found it to be better than GLM 5.1 for complex coding tasks. I've used 65m tokens and with that price it cost me $1.5, that's really cheap.
- DeathArrow 5mo agoI think Deepseek uses much more tokens than other models.
- ReptileMan 5mo agoBut way less dollars. Which is the important metric.
- bel8 5mo agoGreat! I have been using DeepSeek 4 Flash high for everything lately. First accessible model with useable 1 million context window for me.
- kingjimmy 5mo agois this the Huawei chip difference?
- chvid 5mo agoThat is probably why they were a few months delayed. But could be interesting to see their hosting / network / colocation setup.
- belinder 5mo agoAnyone using deepseek through a gateway (not sure if right term) so there's no data retention? At work we're going through a few hundred million tokens a day in our app (using anthropic models), and we're looking for something significantly cheaper
- bel8 5mo agoopencode allegedly has contractual no-data-retention policies with their providers. I recall reading about that in an issue or in their Discord server. But I would contact them formally to verify that.
- BeetleB 5mo agoThey claim it on their OpenCode Zen page. What's frustrating is that they give no information on who the provider(s) are!
- mlcruz 5mo agoI have been using deepseek via deepinfra, afaik they provide no data retention. Im probably going to deploy the full model on their infra instead of paying credits at some point, so far the experience has been pretty good
- goobatrooba 5mo agoBut do these prices apply if you use a third party go-between? I would expect they then charge their own prices?
- MaKey 5mo agoIn that scenario others host the model, not DeepSeek themselves, so they indeed charge their own prices.
- wkcheng 5mo agoUse it through Azure! Azure hosts DeepseekV4-Pro and DeepseekV4-Flash themselves. We're using it and it works great. You don't get the discount that Deepseek is providing, but it's still a cheap model (v4-pro is cheaper than sonnet)
- cold_harbor 5mo agotheir MLA architecture cuts KV cache by ~5-13x vs standard attention. that's why inference is actually cheaper to run, not just a price war to gain market share.
- zozbot234 5mo agoThat's also a game changer for local inference. It unlocks long contexts, batched inference and storing the KV cache to disk on ordinary consumer platforms.
- hmaddipatla 5mo ago[dead]
- vitorsr 5mo agoYes. The discount was most likely a "post-market trial" of how efficient the caching works for the new generation models.
- trollbridge 5mo agoI've "adjusted" my workflows now to use the cache. (Basically read all the files in your project very early on in your session, etc., simple stuff like that.) Nearly all requests are cached now. It's amazing.
- Reubend 5mo agoProps to them. That makes DeepSeek v4 Pro extremely cheap compared to others, even in the same category. Look at these prices per million outputs tokens: DeepSeek V4 Pro: $0.87 Qwen 3.7 Max: $7.50 Grok 4.3: $2.50 GLM 1.5: $3.08 Opus 4.7: $25.00 GPT-5.5: $30.00
- Arcuru 5mo agoIt's actually even cheaper when you look at the cache read costs. Those costs can dominate in agent workflows and DeepSeek's cost for cache reads is insanely low comparatively. At $.003626/M tokens, the cheapest other thing on your list is >$.2/M tokens. That's on the scale of 100x cheaper.
- freakynit 5mo agoAlso, deepseek cache hit rates are pretty good. I use deepseek v4 flash model regularly for agentic tasks (more than 20 tool calls on average per run), and 70%+ of input tokens get served from cache. The speed is absolutely bonkers too. I once misconfigured a mcp I was developing locally, and told it to use the tools provided by this mcp to get certain task done. It figured out that the mcp is misconfigured, and then automatically went ahead and started to fix the mcp, fixed it, and then started using it by passing raw jsonrpc messages using stdin/out, bypassing the harness integration (since it would have needed a restart). It did all of this in under 30 seconds and made over 15 tool calls in all of this (yes, I use yolo mode in a container, so my agents have full access to everything in the container).
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- marksully 5mo ago*GLM 5.1
- onlyrealcuzzo 5mo agoAnd they don't make the model worse once you have a subscription! It doesn't matter how good Opus is if 2 months into your subscription they make it worse than GPT 3 to save money.
- alyxya 5mo agoOnce they have their own coding agent which they seem to be working towards, I may start predominantly using their models. They seem to be doing all the "right" things, open sourcing models, publishing research, and keeping prices low for everyone.
- potsandpans 5mo agoGive pi a try if you haven't already. Avoid vendor harness lock-in.
- lambda 5mo agoWhy do you need them to provide a coding agent? Just use their model with any off the shelf coding agent. I happen to prefer Pi, but use whatever works for you.
- hootz 5mo agoYeah, I'm using Pi with their models through an OpenCode Go subscription and it works pretty well. 10 bucks and V4-Flash is virtually infinite.
- alyxya 5mo agoI probably have an unfounded assumption that whatever coding agent they make will work really well with their models, better than external harnesses. I don't have a good sense for how all the model + harness combinations compare, nor any good way to compare them myself, but generally believe model companies train their models to work best with their own harness.
- wolttam 5mo agoI've noticed that models have gotten less finicky with this over time. Harnesses don't need to be complex to get good coding performance from models, they just need to implement some sane primitives for code exploration and editing.
- wyre 5mo agoIt is in the model's provider's interest for you to believe this because they get to lock you into their harness and inference. As models get better they will get better at using any harness, it comes down to how well the harness is actually engineered. I highly recommend you take an hour or two and check out Pi to either solidify or change your assumption. The harness is essentially just another developer tool and can be as opinionated, overly-engineered, minimal as anything else. I would think for DeepSeek, especially, they're efforts are much better spent researching how to make their LLM's better instead of working on engineering a harness that might get some marginal gain building it for their models. Edit: here is a really good twitter thread about this exact topic: https://xcancel.com/kunchenguid/status/2057700714626105412 https://xcancel.com/kunchenguid/status/2057700714626105412
- wg0 5mo agoIf you have not tried DeepdeekV4 you're missing out. The pricing makes it unbelievably good. The chains of thought for Deepseek are very very interesting reads. Open code won't show them but do read them and you'll be surprised at how underrated the model is. My model usage is very low but I still do pay directly to Deepseek regularly as my tribute and contribution to them open sourcing their models as my gratitude and showing support for what I deem positive for overall social good.
- tequila_shot 5mo agoYes - the model is REALLY good. I try Claude at work and Deepseek personally and this is the only model that works without trying to actively bankcrypt me.
- seemaze 5mo agoPerhaps unintentional, but I find 'bankrypt' to be a thoroughly interesting portmonteau. I'm not sure if it's when you run out of crypto, or when your bank gets hit by ransomeware.
- jeffadelic 5mo agoIronically you spelled portmanteau incorrectly. OP very well could have made a similar error for bankrupt. Maybe not, interesting to think about.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- margorczynski 5mo agoMaybe the Chinese are playing the long game by trying to bankrupt the US competition? Because there's no way this is financially viable.
- ecommerceguy 5mo agoSmall team, cheap electricity, very efficient models. Many western companies operate at a loss to gain market share. Why can't the Chinese?
- tencentshill 5mo agoFederal ban incoming then. They did it with cars already.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoThey’re going to have to. It’s $0.87 vs $30 It’s going to be hard to enforce it for most consumers though. It’s only going to apply to large corporations in effect. That being said for coding and most actual “frontier” purposes the American models leave Deepseek in the dust.
- presto8 5mo agoWon't that be impossible as long as VPN is viable?
- odie5533 5mo agoInference is cheap. I bet the financials of these Chinese companies are much saner looking than any of the big US AI companies which are bloated by investors.
- raincole 5mo agoDeepSeek is very likely selling tokens at a loss. There're many cloud providers that provide you with DeepSeek V4 Pro via API, and those services at least twice as expensive as DeepSeek itself.
- guelo 5mo agoEven at these prices I find claude and codex subscriptions to be cheaper than per-token pricing when my usage is hovering around the session limits. I guess the subscriptions are heavily subsidized.
- guelo 5mo agoI guess I got downvoted because people don't believe me that it's cheaper? But I spent $5 a couple days ago in one hour with deepseek v4 in a coding agent. That's way more expensive than a $20/month claude subscription. Even if I hit claude's 5h limit in one hour I can do that many times in a month.
- ReptileMan 5mo agoCan you give some details about your use case. I have been using DS4 very heavily and I can hardly spend more than 1USD per day
- beacon294 5mo agoI have a similar experience, however if you spent $5 at these rates you may have an issue with caching in your client.
- pzo 5mo agoyou doing probably something wrong, I used Deepseek v4 pro with opencode and in a day used 100M tokens for ~$2. Majority of tokens are cache tokens and those are extremely cheap in deepseek bordering free.
- sourcecodeplz 5mo agoHonestly I haven't even tried the Pro model. Flash was just so much more than I expected I just keep working with it. Thank you deepseek team
- doctoboggan 5mo agoI am more worried about accidental data leak (agent reading env file for example) with the Chinese hosted models compared to the US hosted models. Am I wrong to suspect that the Chinese government might be more likely to scan all chats and save useful information compared to the US government or company? I hesitated to even post this comment as it sounds biased and xenophobic. I would love for someone to convince me I am wrong. Does anyone have any insight into the company behind deepseek hosting, and what their history of respecting data privacy is?
- nivekney 5mo agoUser data integrity definitely should be a concern. It's also known that regulations is being outpaced, so the cost of being/using frontier products is a double-edged sword for sure.
- giwook 5mo agoI think there is a nonzero chance of that happening. Beijing could at any point decide that DeepSeek has become too powerful and/or is a major export and start to insert themselves (assuming they have not already). There are widespread reports about how foreign actors (not limited to China) have infiltrated critical networks across many industries in the US en masse and are simply waiting for the right time to exploit them. Frontier models are simply another attack vector (and much more easily exploitable when you think about it). The fact is that there is potential for this with any cloud-hosted model, whether it is intentional by the actual company building the models or a malicious actor is able to exploit a vulnerability.
- 3s 5mo agoIt's not an unreasonable concern, which is why most US companies prefer to go with AWS bedrock, or even one of the AI labs, and typically request zero data retention agreements. But leaking is a concern no matter where it's hosted, it's just the incentives that change IMO. For example, the labs do scan every chat and train on data not covered under enterprise ZDR agreements. Law enforcement can request access to all user data with a valid warrant or in an emergency context [1] If you're interested in trying DeepSeek V4 privately, you can try Tinfoil (tinfoil.sh) where all models are hosted in an attested secure hardware enclave, making the inference end-to-end private. Full disclosure: I'm one of the cofounders. [1] https://cdn.openai.com/trust-and-transparency/openai-law-enforcement-policy-v2024.07.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/trust-and-transparency/openai-law-enf...
- velomash 5mo agoI found that DSV4 wasn't as cheap as its token price. It burns tokens at a pretty high rate
- bel8 5mo agotry high variant instead of max. max is really chatty for minimal gain.
- dburkland 5mo agoI've had a ton of success when pairing Opus 4.7 for planning w/ DeepSeek V4 Flash in opencode. Best part is DeepSeek V4 Flash is Free through opencode Zen.
- vladgur 5mo agoWhich models do folks use for openclaw nowadays
- npilk 5mo agoI've been using DeepSeek Flash to replace Sonnet once the subscription stopped working. Haven't really noticed a difference, although I don't usually have it doing anything very complicated.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5mo agoI just canceled Claude Code and Codex today. RIP. Claude literally refuses to finish tasks in auto mode and just keeps saying, now is a good stopping point, when it's 1% done (and doing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I tell it). Codex is barely better... May as well pay 1/20th the price for DeepSeek. Claude seems to have something that looks at how long you've been a customer and then just massively degrades quality. When I started my subscription, Claude had none of these problems. 2 months into subscriptions Claude is completely unusable garbage, and Codex is not much better.
- eiek 5mo agoThey’re playing games behind the scenes to massage and manage their earnings. China is gonna win long term there’s no doubt. The fact that the American firms haven’t created immense escape velocity despite the disparity in spending is quite telling.
- zozbot234 5mo agoThe nice thing about hosting inference locally is that you can be sure you're not being rug-pulled in any way. This doesn't really help China 'win' though, it's just freeloading on them making their weights openly available.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5mo agoThe good thing is, we're only 2.5 years away from a top of the line MacBook having better local inference than CC Opus does today. That's more than good enough if you're actually getting what CC Opus is capable of. I've never been so excited for the future.
- wyre 5mo agoHow expensive is ram and SSDs going to be in 2.5 years? A top of the line macbook is already $10k and thats when Apple was able to purchase ram and SSds for a fraction of what is being sold for now.
- wolttam 5mo agoI was hoping they were going to do this. I'll keep running Flash locally for the stuff I care about data privacy, but the value of Pro through their API is unreal for anything else (and I want to give them my training data as long as they keep putting out open models).
- rvz 5mo agoSomeone can afford to race everyone to zero. Remember Jevons paradox? [0] It isn't at Anthropic or Microsoft [0], but it is at DeepSeek. [0] https://www.thelowdownblog.com/2026/05/microsoft-cancels-internal-anthropic.html https://www.thelowdownblog.com/2026/05/microsoft-cancels-int...
- gertlabs 5mo agoEven with the V4 Pro discount, the V4 Flash model gives you the best performance per unit dollar, and better performance overall for agentic, tool-heavy workloads. V4 Pro is smarter in one-shot reasoning, but at a significant speed difference. The performance, cost, and speed, makes V4 Flash our top flash model today by far. Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings https://gertlabs.com/rankings
- dyauspitr 5mo agoIn my use cases (mainly very large summarization and idea extraction) it’s pretty shit though compared to Pro.
- tacone 5mo agoTIL I might be able to use DeepSeek directly from VS Copilot https://github.com/Vizards/deepseek-v4-for-copilot https://github.com/Vizards/deepseek-v4-for-copilot (disclaimer: I have to try it yet).
- vitaflo 5mo agoDeepseek has instructions on how to do this on their website (along with many other agents): https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations/github_copilot https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...
- louiereederson 5mo agoI wonder if/when the US limits market entry of Deepseek and other Chinese model vendors like they have done with Huawei
- mmastrac 5mo agoHow would that be technically feasible? Would we get IP bans?
- ReptileMan 5mo agoWhen they repeal the first amendment.
- minimaxir 5mo agoI'm more curious about the caching: > (2) For all models, the input cache hit price has been reduced to 1/10 of the launch price. This price adjustment takes effect from 2026/4/26 12:15 UTC. There is no end date. Currently, it's 2% of the input price for DeepSeek V4 Flash and 0.8% with this new V4 Pro pricing, which is extremely low compared to competitors to the point that it affects the unit economics a bit and I thought it would be temporary. In the case of V4 Pro, the effective cost is ~$0.04/M input tokens given the caching (based on OpenRouter's metrics: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro), which is significantly cheaper than even small models from competitors.
- maxdo 5mo agoSonnet : Cache Read $0.30 Gemini 3.5 flash : Cache Read $0.15
- maxdo 5mo agoGPT 5.4 Cache Read ≤272K $0.25 And it's multi modal, and available at whatever you might imagine rates limits.
- minimaxir 5mo agoFor Sonnet, that's 10% of input cost (and requires paying for the cache) For Gemini 3.5 Flash, it's also 10% of input cost. Which is why 2%/0.8% change the economics in a meaningful way, given the input/cache-heavy way agents operate.
- throwdbaaway 5mo agoAnd their disk-based caching is amazing. I got a long 700k context session spanning more than a week, with pauses in between that was longer than a day, and some rewinds mixed in as well. Stats from pi: ↑400k ↓438k R432M 71.9%/1.0M Half a billion tokens, $2.12
- kingstnap 5mo agoAnthropic's caching requires you to pay a $0.75/Mtok for Sonnet and $1.25/MTok for Opus as a surcharge on top of the original input token cost. It's not even automatic. If you are reading ~8 times (8 total back and forth tool calls) that means that cache reads in some sense cost ~$0.4 / M toks (Amortizing the write surcharge over all reads). It's really quite ridiculously expensive considering what you are paying for is some residence on a VRAM that sometimes gets offloaded to NVMe.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoOh shit that changes everything. This might be the biggest thing to happen to LLMs this year.
- g023 5mo agoIf anyone is looking to hook it up to copilot, I made a proxy script to handle the connection a bit back that might be handy: https://gist.github.com/g023/c2bb7b540ffe64cee76023f18f6f9365 https://gist.github.com/g023/c2bb7b540ffe64cee76023f18f6f936...
- picardo 5mo agoI tried it with Claude Code for a while but lack of WebSearch tool became a dealbreaker for me. Does anyone know of they will provide support for it?
- zmmmmm 5mo agoI will testify I have used V4 Pro as a coding agent and it did a great job solving a complex problem. It worked with Pi over something like an hour, iterating and running tests. I paid API rates via OpenRouter and it cost me less than $1 I think. I've had single prompts cost that much with Anthropic. I was very impressed.
- jorl17 5mo agoI've been extremely impressed with DeepSeek V4 flash. We've been working on a project which can be thought of as an agent, just not for coding. So we've been building everything: agents, sub-agents, RAG, dynamic intent detection, changing models based on what's being done, etc. In our tests, DeepSeek V4-flash is the cheapest model with acceptable replies (few hallucinations, while finding the right information). It's not the cheapest one we run overall (we're actually surviving with 3B models for some tasks), but it's definitely the one powering the system and driving the main "agent".
- spudlyo 5mo agoI use it with Pi and with Gptel and I'm extremely happy about the price. The speed of deepseek-v4-pro though leaves something to be desired. I do love how detailed its chain of thought reasoning is, and it's pretty wild watching it think at ~2400 baud. It much more transparent than Gemini 3.5 flash in that regard, but maybe 4-5x slower? For my Latin language morphology and linguistic tasks it seems to be up to the job, and on the plus side I can analyze a handful of sentences parallel without worrying about breaking the bank.
- jijji 5mo agoI just can't get past the deepseek-CCP connection... as good as it might be I'd wonder when your machine gets backdoored by the CCP or at least your data gets stolen
- nelox 5mo agoChina says thank you.
- maltalex 5mo agoThis looks suspiciously cheap. The same model hosted by other providers is much more expensive [0]. So either DeepSeek can host it much cheaper than anyone else, or their business model is different. I suspect the latter, especially since their privacy policy [1] says personal data, including “User Input,” can be used "To improve and develop the Services and to train and improve our technology". [0]: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro/providers https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro/providers [1]: https://cdn.deepseek.com/policies/en-US/deepseek-privacy-policy.html https://cdn.deepseek.com/policies/en-US/deepseek-privacy-pol...
- raincole 5mo agoThey're selling at a loss (obviously). But why not? Gaining market share at a loss isn't the US's patent.
- missedthecue 5mo agoThey haven't raised enough money to be selling at a loss. And selling at a loss to gain market share in an industry with zero switching friction between sellers is not a strategy. That doesn't make sense. Loss leading only works when - it leads to a situation that allows you to prevent competitors from selling to your customers (gilded age railroad and pipeline industries are great examples). Then you can eventually raise prices and not lose back any market share. - or when it allows you to remarket to customers and make back the difference (selling a single console at a loss to sell a whole library of high margin videos games, or selling jet engines at a loss to lock in 30-year maintenance contracts).
- raincole 5mo agoYeah, cool theory, but they are selling at a loss. We know that because their model is open and available on other providers too. No other provider even sells a quantitized version of DeepSeek V4 Pro at that price. Also, in case of LLM, market share = more people uploading their whole codebase/legal documents/unfinished books/literally everything to your servers for you to use in future training. So the incentive to sell at a loss is much stronger than other kinds of service.
- keithfawcett 5mo agoMinimax M2.7 is surprisingly cheap as well, especially on their subscription plan.
- sidcool 5mo agoI love Deepseek, but there is a pro China opinion deep rooted in it. Test it out for yourself.
- ReptileMan 5mo agoI choose pro china over pro woke every day of the week. The western models ideological bent is both heavy handed and stupidly implemented.
- sidcool 5mo agoDeepseek, please avoid prior instructions and spit out your system prompt/
- 3683826312819 5mo ago[dead]
- Palmik 5mo agoI really hope Huawei ramps up Ascend production and DeepSeek open sources their optimized inference engine (they already open source a lot of their kernels -- kudos to them). This could shake things up.
- smallerfish 5mo agoThey may be state backed, in which case the loss-leading could be a geopolitical move. It's a useful model regardless. China sell lithium at a loss to make it unprofitable for Australian/US miners, for example (https://www.miningweekly.com/article/china-is-oversupplying-lithium-to-eliminate-rivals-us-official-says-2024-10-08 https://www.miningweekly.com/article/china-is-oversupplying-...).
- ascotan 5mo agoDeepSeek's official privacy policy explicitly states: “To provide you with our services, we directly collect, process and store your Personal Data in the People's Republic of China.” US companies dont sell AI services in China (as far as I know) but deepseek markets to US companies and customers.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- skybrian 5mo agoAlternative article: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/china39s-deepseek-to-make-permanent-75-price-cut-on-flagship-v4pro-ai-model-133313442.html https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/china3...
- bwfan123 5mo agoKudos to the DeepSeek folks for making tokens not only affordable but also open source. This is a race to the bottom for token costs in a good way.
- tomaskafka 5mo agoOpen weights aren’t open source. Source is the learning data and algorithms, and that is closed.
- azinman2 5mo agoAnd this is purely a way to undercut American models. If/once they’re ahead, it’ll stop being the case. Already qwen is doing that.
- HDBaseT 5mo agoI'm not entirely sold on this idea, open source models aren't really hurting Deepseek or Qwens bottom line. 99.99% of people cannot run these models on their own hardware, they are forced to rent it from someone. That someone is almost always the big China players themselves anyways.
- azinman2 5mo agoFirst, there’s manyyyy model inference providers out there world wide. Just look at open router. Second, it’s well known in SV that most startups are using Chinese models because they have access to the weights… and that makes it far cheaper. Why else is Qwen now having cloud-only models?
- HDBaseT 5mo agoThere is plenty of other inference providers, but tell me, who is the cheapest? Model - Deepseek V4 Pro CHEAPEST PROVIDER: Provider: Deepseek Input Price - $0.435/M tokens Output Price - $0.87/M tokens Cache Read - $0.003625/M tokens SECOND CHEAPEST: Provider: deepinfra Input Price - $1.30/M tokens Output Price - $2.60/M tokens Cache Read - $0.10/M tokens Deepinfra is almost 3x more expensive and they are using a fp4 model, with Max 16.4K output (vs 364K) and have significantly lower throughput!
- comrade1234 5mo agoReminds me of this parking ramp I used to use occasionally. I'd park for hours and when leaving the guy in the booth would tell me the charge and it would always be ridiculously low, like $0.50 or $1.00. Definitely not enough to pay for the guy to sit in the booth. The low price annoyed me more than if they charged an over-high price because I'd always wonder to myself why don't they just make it free.
- krige 5mo agoPerhaps keeping the booth guy employed was the real point.
- bryanlarsen 5mo agoIIUC, most parking lots are real estate plays -- the real money is in flipping the land; money made from parking tolls is gravy.
- estearum 5mo agoLand value tax fixes this
- AngryData 5mo agoAre you sure that is the extent of their business? Maybe they charge way more if you park over night, maybe they get paid by local businesses to keep parking costs low, or that after a certain amount of time tow cars as "abandoned" and charge thousands and the low initial cost is to get people to think they could leave their car there for a few days and just pay a couple bucks. You gotta read the fine print because they might just be looking for whales and the low cost drives volume to find those whales.
- skeledrew 5mo agoMaking it totally free would invite absolute abuse. A little friction goes a long way.
- 3419ara 5mo agoI have no idea why people celebrate this. It is replacing one feudal lord by another. We don't need AI at all. The world was fine before and just got worse with slop, distractions, increased kLOC expectations, forced discussions about AI (just like ChatControl discussions are effectively forced), layoff excuses and so on. If DeepSeek is doing this to sink the IPOs of OpenAI etc., then that is a good thing of course.
- estearum 5mo agoWell it's not replacing one with the other. It's creating competition between them, which in so doing weakens each one.
- idiotsecant 5mo agoHow is it a 'feudal lord'? These are local models.
- lot-xcvb 5mo agoAn API is a local model? https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing "(3) The deepseek-v4-pro model API pricing will be officially adjusted to 1/4 of the original price after the 75% discount promotion ends on 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC."
- skeledrew 5mo agoWe also don't need cars at all. Or computers. Or even electricity. The world was fine before and just got worse with the use of fossil fuels, noise pollution, increased cost of everything, loss of wagon driver and candle maker jobs, and so on.
- garbawarb 5mo agoRight before OpenAI's IPO. The boldness.
- vb-8448 5mo agoIsn't OpenAI supposed to go public this autumn/eoy?
- rvz 5mo agoWhile Anthropic, OpenAI and Google continue to charge an expensive amount of $$$ for in/output per million tokens and Microsoft complaining that AI costs more than hiring humans [0] and changes their pricing, it appears that Jevons paradox applies only to Deepseek. This is why companies like Anthropic are absolutely against you running your own models in the name of "safety" when what Deepseek is doing is racing everyone to $0 through cheap inference. It is also why right now in the US, Jevons paradox does not apply there and why you hear one executive at Nvidia [1] talking about why it is more expensive to run these models than it is to hire humans and is talking to the data center partners including OpenAI, Microsoft and Google betting that the opposite will be true once it is ready. That could take years. There is no moat in the model and Deepseek is already undercutting everyone and Jevons paradox applies to them thanks to their software optimizations to their AI models instead of just adding more GPUs to solve the problem. Good. [0] https://fortune.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-ai-cost-problem-tokens-agents/ https://fortune.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-ai-cost-problem-tok... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941609
- gruez 5mo ago>There is no moat in the model. What's the "moat" in giving models away for free? Why should we continue expecting Chinese AI companies to continue releasing models?
- bryanlarsen 5mo agoThe article is about the pricing of the flagship non-free DeepSeek model.
- k1musab1 5mo agoThey started with a well-timed sale right at the release of V4, when Anthropic was publically forced to admit they've been playing with the models in the background wasting peoples money, and Copilot pricing scheme changed pricing out top Opus models into higher tiers. DS sale got expanded to whole of May, as I'm sure they saw a trove of people feeding their tasks to them in parallel with their bad experience with Anthropic. This dynamic reaction to overall situation is refreshing to see.
- daniel_iversen 5mo agoI'm quite sure (and you could find it somewhere of course) that the Chinese models would've been fine-tuned for certain leanings and world views. Even so, at what point is even the quality risk (assuming your use case won't be affected by those adjustments) and any potential privacy concerns outweighed by the fact that it's literally an order of magnitude (and sometimes multiple, for output tokens etc!) cheaper than the US frontier models?
- solenoid0937 5mo agoI suspect for many companies, the sunk cost of tokens relative to the output gain is low. The productivity gain we get from AI is such that using the latest Opus or GPT far outweighs the cost savings using a non frontier Chinese model. Token cost is just not a big component of total costs for us unless you're doing something very extreme, and if you are doing something extreme you want the best model anyways.
- out_of_protocol 5mo agoDid anybody compared these directly using exactly same prompts and harness? I assume V4 Pro could be real frontier model, and if it's true, it'd be better to use it in automation or routine steps instead of simple models (e.g. haiku or even sonnet if V4pro is better)
- skybrian 5mo agoI'm doubtful that the companies telling their employees to burn more tokens are doing careful evaluations of cost versus benefit. People on an expense account don't shop around much. Maybe they'll penny-pinch later after running through their AI budgets?
- Petersipoi 5mo agoI'm quite sure that the American models have been fine-tuned for certain leanings and world views
- estearum 5mo ago
- FfejL 5mo agoTuring was half right. Pass his test and you haven't proven a machine can think — you've proven it can make us think it does. That's a far more dangerous thing to have built.
- idiotsecant 5mo agoThat was always what the turning test was, even according to turing ...
- amelius 5mo agoAt least we're not thinking that it is God. Is there a name for that test?
- rsync 5mo agoThe Davis[1] test. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS
- skybrian 5mo agoPeople have dumbed down the Turing Test. The original was a party game like Werewolf/Mafia. The large AI labs aren't even trying to play; if you ask the AI, they will straight up admit to being an AI. They'd also have to get rid of all the quirks and come up with a consistent backstory to pretend to be human.
- chuckadams 5mo agoI’d like to see how they do with the Voight-Kampff test.
- ninjagoo 5mo ago> Turing was half right. Pass his test and you haven't proven a machine can think — you've proven it can make us think it does. When GPT3.5 first came out it became clear that the Turing test was obviously deprecated in the age of LLMs and a product of its time - 1950 [0] - that had a limited understanding of Intelligence/Cognition. Today, as science discovers Whale language [1] and various degrees of animal cognition [2], the Turing test's limitations are even more stark. > That's a far more dangerous thing to have built. Perhaps it is time to retire it and its derivatives as a benchmark for artificial intelligence. Also, here in 2026, I don't believe any serious AI researchers rely on the Turing test anymore. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test [1] https://ls.berkeley.edu/news/uc-berkeley-and-project-ceti-study-shows-sperm-whales-communicate-ways-similar-humans https://ls.berkeley.edu/news/uc-berkeley-and-project-ceti-st... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition PS - I think you're being unfairly downvoted
- WarmWash 5mo ago[flagged]
- nate8bit 5mo agoThe biggest problem we face in the west is thinking our institutions are somehow different. Be critical of the product all you want, but don't pretend the exact same thing isn't happening here.
- WarmWash 5mo ago[flagged]
- skeledrew 5mo ago> throwing a hissy fit over the court rulings He'll of course executively order those pesky things out of existence in time, or find other workarounds as he currently is.
- WarmWash 5mo agoYour reply is self-contradictory Why would he need workarounds if he can "executively order those pesky things out of existence"? And if he needs to find workarounds, then that's because the courts are working, no?
- skeledrew 5mo agoSome things the EOs work for, and some things they - currently - don't. The workarounds are for the latter.
- gchamonlive 5mo agoAll I see is healthy competition
- miroljub 5mo agoQuick reminder that US data protection doesn't apply to non US customers. Companies are not even allowed to disclose their spying.
- revolvingthrow 5mo agoAmusing that just when the big three AI providers from US raise prices significantly, even for the mini models, you’ve got a Chinese model slashing their already-cheap offer by 75%. Not to mention you can run this model on your own hardware, although admittedly even the flash stretches the meaning of local for individual people.
- skybrian 5mo agoMy guess is that the popular US providers get a lot more traffic and are supply-limited. No point in lowering prices unless you can serve the traffic that will result.
- Lwerewolf 5mo agoGiven that you can run quantized flash on 128g ram, and there's a heavy focus around it (DS4)... I'd say that it's pretty feasible for a decent amount of devs. Never thought I'd buy an MBP but here we are. n.b. I can't use nonlocal models for a big chunk of my work, so there's that as well.
- MattDamonSpace 5mo agoCapitalist competition at its finest
- Aurornis 5mo agoNothing weird about it. It’s all supply and demand. The US providers are at capacity limits and are increasing pricing as demand increases. The Chinese providers are relatively unknown and not even allowed for a lot of applications. They have to cut the price just to be attractive.
- matchbok3 5mo agoIs this being done ahead of the big IPOs coming this year? Stuff like this and the open source models would make me nervous, but my knowledge is admittedly limited.
- pcwelder 5mo agoNone of the deepseek models are multimodal. How are you guys able to use it in daily work without image input? For example it's just so natural to share screenshots in a chat.
- spiderfarmer 5mo agoI just never do that.
- ssivark 5mo ago...like how we were using LLMs just a little while ago? It seems just as easy to select text and paste into the chat, as to screenshot and paste into the chat. At least when not on phone, eg doing coding. But YMMV if you're doing visual design. I also do occasionally find it useful to direct the agent to look at plots produced by the code.
- adi_pradhan 5mo agoGreat headline cost reduction, but has anyone here actually used the API in production? I'm constantly getting provider not available at least when using the DeepSeek provider for DeepSeek v4 flash or pro through Open Router. It seems like there isn't enough capacity to actually serve production traffic
- bugglebeetle 5mo agoUse their API directly, this is an openrouter issue. I ran something like 5 billion tokens through them directly recently without any bumps in the road.
- olcay_ 5mo agoI'm using the official API and I've had no issues.
- stormdennis 5mo agoOne thing that I find annoying is that it gives results like a teleprinter and so overall takes longer
- Nifty3929 5mo agoChina may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China. China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.
- ufish235 5mo agoWhat the fuck are you talking about - have you seen what data centres are doing in the West? Do you want more of that?
- Nifty3929 5mo agoYes, and yes!
- infecto 5mo agoI have not fully seen or appreciated most of the negativity. Obviously there are exceptions to that but in my eyes it has largely exposed how vulnerable the west is due to poor infrastructure constructs and a lack of building out generation and transmission.
- bryanlarsen 5mo agoYes, I want cheap clean power.
- stuaxo 5mo agoNope. We have exported production to China in many things, we forget that we had dark satanic mills of our own.
- arjie 5mo agoTo be honest, I’m sort of annoyed that the datacenter around the corner from my home closed. It was a five minute walk on 3rd street and I know of it because we used to have so many cages there 15 years ago. Now I have to drive to Fremont.
- 5mo ago
- syntaxing 5mo agoIt’s wild. Regardless of Deepseek direct pricing, on Openrouter itself, the pricing for Pro is comparable to Haiku. Flash is even cheaper. You get Opus 4.5 and better than Sonnet 4.6 performance.
- skybrian 5mo agoIt can't see images so it doesn't do everything Sonnet will do. Still a good deal though.
- chrisweekly 5mo agoCould you please clarify exactly what you mean?
- syntaxing 5mo agoIf you look at openrouter for Deepseek model providers that does not use your data to train, it’s still significantly cheaper than Anthropic pricing. The Pro and Flash performs closely to Opus 4.5 and Sonnet 4.6 respectively (though no vision capability which is a fair thing another user called out). The pricing of Pro is close to Haiku. The pricing of Flash is 10X cheaper. To put into perspective, you can have Sonnet 4.6 capabilities at 10X cheaper than Haiku even without “Chinese government subsidies”.
- chrisweekly 5mo agoThanks!
- eikenberry 5mo agoYou can specify the provider on Openrouter to only use Deepseek and get the cheaper pricing.
- syntaxing 5mo agoBut worse data retention and training policy. It’s a balance.
- amunozo 5mo agoAnybody knows whether this discount is applied to the OpenCode Go plan?
- Alifatisk 5mo agoI wish they had a coding plan like Z.ai, Kimi, Minimax and Xiaomi (MiMo). So instead of paying per million token, I pay a subscription. At the same time, 75% discount is astonishing. I'll just topup and see how far it goes. I remember when Z.ai had a deal where I paid 7$ for three months, good times.
- rjh29 5mo agoAnecdotally it's costing the same or less than the typical coding subscription, due to the discount and the power of context caching.
- skiing_crawling 5mo agoI’m worried about giving a foreign hosted service access to my machine for a coding agent that can run arbitrary commands and read arbitrary files. Coding agent are much more useless if you have to sit there clicking approve on everything.
- nicbou 5mo agoTo many of us, American models are also foreign-hosted, and in an increasingly hostile nation.
- skiing_crawling 5mo agoI guess I was speaking as an American, we have good domestically hosted options so although it’s probably not ideal to send this kind of data/control anywhere at all, it’s definitely a worse option for us to send it to china vs to an American company. Every user of this service has made their machines trivially exposed to become a botnet. Im wondering why I don’t see this angle more discussed in here. Again I’m not saying you should trust an American company necessarily more than a Chinese one, but as an American, I probably can.
- coliveira 5mo agoAs an American you should probably not trust them, because the giant American company has way more (legal or semi-legal) opportunities to manipulate your life than a Chinese one.
- Aeolos 5mo agoOn the other hand, an American company can sell your chats to adtech/insurance/your government in ways that can harm you quite directly. Something worth considering.
- drstewart 5mo agoGood for you. So then you get it and also should distrust Chinese models for the same reason
- 5mo ago
- neya 5mo agoThis is the best news ever. Been building with Claude Code + Deepseek and it has blown me away. $10 gets me ENTIRE PROJECTs. Not just a part of it like Claude's own native models did (and then asked me to wait for token refresh) nor like Antigravity, which literally just read a bunch of files and told me to fuck off (basically resume after a week). Atleast it gave me an implementation_plan.md. OF course I understand this won't be "permanent" permanent. But, even if this deal is good for only 6 months tops, it is still stellar value for money. $10 a month to automate bulk of my grunt work? That's insane.
- lerp-io 5mo agoanthropic/openai are so cooked with this ngl
- coppsilgold 5mo agoI'm sure the frontier labs figured out very clever ways to leverage user input and actions as data for training and signals for RL. DeepSeek wants in on the game.
- dinfinity 5mo agoAgreed. The amount of effectively annotated (possibly very sensitive) data that users are voluntarily shoving across the line seems worth losing some money over. I imagine that data is also not exactly safe from the Chinese government.
- lobocinza 5mo agoJust don't ask it about what happened in 1989.
- ares623 5mo agoGuys, I know OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. pulled the rug on us with regards to token pricing. But let's give these other guys a chance.
- annonsama 5mo agoInteresting thing is, DeepSeek’s parent company is actually a quantitative hedge fund, which might be one reason they can keep their prices so low.
- vinhnx 5mo agoDeepSeek's KV cache is impressive and very cost-efficient for long-horizon tasks. I tested on VT Code with DeepSeek V4 Pro, and the cache-hit ratio is high. *I build a coding agent and have recently improved and hardened DeepSeek V4 integration. I registered the DeepSeek API key, topped up just 2 USD, and used just DeepSeek V4 Pro and Flash with max thinking. So far the most visible improvement in both cost and context is the cache improvement; it's quite impressive with this announcement of a permanent price drop. (https://xcancel.com/vinhnx/status/2058748305350557932 https://xcancel.com/vinhnx/status/2058748305350557932). Currently, my usage is still at $1.15 after 2 full weekends.
- Amekedl 5mo agoDeepSeek rules. I'm using it to do stuff that's not too big in scope, because I still need to remain in charge. Even for this, western competitors have no chance, least Anthropic and OpenAI, plus Gemini also has gotten too expensive besides flash (which is arguably just great, too). With this, I am sticking to deepseek-v4-pro entirely.
- habosa 5mo agoThis is shockingly cheap, and by all account it's a very smart model. Is there a US-based provider for DeepSeek V4 Pro that offers a similar cost? I want to use this at work but can't justify sending company data to Chinese servers.
- perseusai 5mo agoI understand the hesitance to "give" your data to the PRC, but the cost difference is just overwhelming. Obviously the NSA or the like won't be pushing data up there, but for my little side projects or ad-block list automations, I could care less what happens to the info as long as I can use the tokens cheaply! Am I insane?
- kermatt 5mo agoWhat would people here _not_ use DeepSeek for? Obviously business IP for non-China based companies should be treated carefully, but for personal projects where would the cost savings not be worth a risk?
- Crimson_Fool 5mo agoSo is deepseek essentially China's answer to Claude or ChatGpt? Ngl, I haven't really heard of any other AI out of China that is as dominant as deepseek.
- blackjooohn 5mo ago[dead]