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Xiaomi MiMo-v2.5 Series API Permanent Price Reduction Up to 99%
- rjhy2020 4mo agoOK. Google was just killed. How is it possible to reduce the price by 99%??????? This is crazy
- dyauspitr 4mo agoState backed loss leaders.
- x3ro 4mo agoIs that worse than VC-backed loss leaders? :)
- dyauspitr 4mo agoYes. VCs can’t compete with the second largest economy on the planet.
- drcongo 4mo agoI think this is probably correct based on the way state investment into the Chinese EV market has been working - fund a whole bunch of them and let them fight it out to be one of the few brands that will have the longevity. It's pretty brutal with the cars.
- andrekandre 4mo ago> let them fight it out yep, from what i hear, the govt makes sure there is intense local competition in the market so it produces a few really good companies that survive... its kind ironic considering what is going on with mono/oligopolies over here...
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- readthenotes1 4mo agoThe rest of the best of the business is paying for it
- zrn900 4mo ago- Cheap electricity - Cheap, domestically produced GPUs - Efficiency research by many phDs. (many AI companies used Deepseek's research though)
- greenavocado 4mo agoAdd to that home made inference chips and dirt cheap RAM from CXMT
- dubcanada 4mo agoIndustrial Chinese electricity costs is similar to that of Texas, It's 8-9cents a kWh. The only benefit is industrial China decides to put millions of solar panels down, so "peak" sunlight hours can drop electricity costs significantly since their rates are highly dynamic.
- kingstnap 4mo agoThe reduction is in cached inputs. I've commented about this before but many labs, except Deepseek and Xaomi now, absolutely scam you for cached reads. You are basically paying out the nose for a few seconds of VRAM residence if you are giving significant money for cache reads. The very nature of autoregressive language modeling is that every single output token produced "reads" the cache. So in principle the price floor for a cache hit is the flat cost of 1 output token. Now in reality it has to be more than that because you are occupying VRAM with the cache that forces out other users. But it can still be really cheap.
- Bolwin 4mo agoNo one is producing one output token though. And using up gpus for that cache is a pretty big opportunity cost. I highly doubt it's done in vram. That would be insane for the one hour caches. So its memory + the time it takes to unload/load into vram + the extra cost per output token Is it a scam? Idk
- sourcecodeplz 4mo agoI've read on X that deepseek api can stay alive for hours vs 5 minutes tops for other providers. they do it with ram and ssd, not only vram.
- rvz 4mo agoFirst Deepseek, Now Xiaomi. A price cut of 99%. This is why Anthropic wants these chinese AI models banned as they are in the lead in the AI race to zero and they know that there is no modal moat. So don't tell Dario.
- han1 4mo agoLike I said. China doesn't care about money. We want AI in people's hands.
- culi 4mo agoI mean the AI companies probably just want to make American model pricing look ridiculous in comparison (it's working imo). I think the government probably wants actually-useful AI that could be put into chips and actually revolutionize factory work or mining or whatever. Large, SOTA models are not gonna change factory work but extremely efficient and optimized models may Every industry-wide scale technological revolution has happened because government funded a technology and then opened it up to the masses. Just look at your iPhone: GPS, the internet, AI voice assistants, touchscreens, microprocessors, lithium-ion batteries, etc all came from gov't research (I'm counting Bell Labs' gov't mandated monopoly + research funding as gov't) Economist Mariana Mazzucato wrote a great book about this called The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths
- zrn900 4mo ago> I mean the AI companies probably just want to make American model pricing look ridiculous in comparison (it's working imo) I really don't think China cares about that. Chinese government's governance logic is making everything so cheap that everyone can get and use it. They did it with EVs and other things. Now they are doing it with the AI.
- _davide_ 4mo agoThey do want to see the American bubble burst, this is the quickest way
- andrekandre 4mo agowith all the price increases in everything else, i think we are all tired of this bubble to be honest...
- passive 4mo agoI worked part time with MiMo 2.5-pro over the last month, and barely managed to use 500 Million of the 700 Million tokens I had allocated. My plan was just upgraded to 38 BILLION tokens per month. That's at least 10X the tokens I've used in my entire agentic development so far. I should probably downgrade my plan, but we'll see. :)
- sisve 4mo agoDid you not get 38B units? And a token = 2.5 unit (cache hit) or up to 600 unis (cache miss)
- passive 4mo agoYeah, I think they did switch the unit type.
- zrn900 4mo agoYep. I also got stupefied after I logged in and saw how many tokens they stuffed into my account...
- 6ak74rfy 4mo agoToken allocation/cost aside, how was the quality of the model? Any comparison with any other model you've used? For example, I've heard DeepSeek v4 Pro is comparable to Sonnet 4.7, so I just bought some credits to try it out.
- passive 4mo agoI was using Gemini and Claude quite a bit over the last year, mostly with pro or opus for planning and flash or sonnet for implementation. MiMo is the best one I've used so far, but I haven't done anything interesting with the Claude 4.7 models. It seems conservative with generally good "instincts", getting things working quickly without too much complexity. I've also embedded it in several different projects so far, and it's been pretty easy and effective.
- CachedaCodes 4mo agoThese and the Deepseek ones that were were cost reduced recently are perfectly capable models for the vast majority of light work and more. It's funny thinking the US companies are hiking prices and Chinese ones do the opposite, it's obviously an strategy, but pretty funny
- MaxPock 4mo agoHow are these "capacity constrained" Chinese companies running inference without Hoppers and Blackwells ?
- lukax 4mo agoHuawei Ascend AI Accellerators. DeepSeek V4 model architecture was optimized for Chinese hardware.
- dijit 4mo agoMaking their own NPUs for inference probably, you don't have to buy NVidia for inference. Google doesn't.
- martinald 4mo agoThey can (not entirely sure how 'grey' market this is) either have subsidiaries outside of china (eg: singapore) that provide the inference and/or just rent it off the public gpu clouds.
- axus 4mo agohttps://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/us-tech-execs-smuggled-nvidia-chips-to-china-prosecutors-say.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/us-tech-execs-smuggled-nvidi...
- Flockster 4mo agoThe 99% is with regards to cached inputs. It seems to now at the same price as deepseek v4-pro
- m3kw9 4mo agoEveryone adding "Permanent" to price cuts now
- hootz 4mo agoCan't be mistaken for someone like, ugh... Anthropic and OpenAI...
- dyauspitr 4mo agoThis sort of pressure will force them to though.
- hootz 4mo agoI hope so, but I don't know if they are in a position where they can offer these kinds of prices. They are already struggling with not losing a lot of money with their models, while chinese models can be independently hosted by inference providers at a profit already. We need to drive these prices down so AI doesn't become a thing for the few who can pay for expensive subscriptions.
- surgical_fire 4mo agoThey can't afford it. OpenAI and Anthropic bleed money and are desperate for an IPO, that they can get some extra mileage.
- pizzly 4mo agonah, just ban using Chinese models and ban open source models. This will allow them to keep the high price. Got to recoup the money spent somehow, time to lobby the government.
- hootz 4mo agoWill try MiMo now. I have been mainly using just DeepSeek lately because of the fact that V4-Flash destroys basic work for basically 0 cost. Haven't exceeded even 50% of my OpenCode Go weekly limits using V4 Flash and Pro.
- zrn900 4mo agoVSCode + Cline + Mimo v2.5 pro works ! great !. Give it a try.
- NitpickLawyer 4mo agoSince the 3rd party providers on openrouter have all converged on much higher prices in serving these models (both mimo and dsv4), there's obviously a question on how/why are they lowering the prices so much. It's possible they've finally integrated cheap(er) chinese chips. It's also possible they're just subsidising inference for real-world usage data. Interesting either way.
- zrn900 4mo ago> how/why are they lowering the prices so much Like I responded to someone else: - Cheap electricity - Cheap, domestically produced GPUs - Efficiency research. (a lot of it from Deepseek's research) Also, the Chinese government wants the AI to be as accessible as EVs so everyone will use it.
- slake 4mo agoAlso if this is on the path of anything the Chinese do in the physical goods world, inference will be rockbottom cheap in a few years because they'll invest in the hell out of energy, GPUs, research, etc. The same thing they did with EVs. Only artificial barriers will keep people using some of the frontier stuff in a couple of years. No costs will justify.
- Aurornis 4mo ago> there's obviously a question on how/why are they lowering the prices so much. Same reason they release some of the models for free: They are trying to capture market share.
- lordofgibbons 4mo agoThe difference is that releasing the model for free doesn't have ongoing cost for the company. Providing cheap tokens is very expensive - specially if you don't have access to the latest transistor node chips. So I think the parent comment is right, there's something else at play allowing DS and Xiaomi to offer these nearly free tokens.
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- throawayonthe 4mo agointeresting/funny: their off-peak rates apply 00:00-08:00 Beijing time, so nine-to-five for someone on the NA west coast :p
- dubcanada 4mo agoChina has a population of 1.4B, US is 349M. 0-8 Beijing time is their off-peak? How is that funny, that's literally how timezones work?
- bel8 4mo agoIt's funny, in a good way, because their off-peak times match perfectly the werstern peak demand.
- ericmay 4mo agoCan folks in China run US-based models? Seems like they should take advantage of this overlap in peak timing.
- linzhangrun 4mo agoYes, use VPN; they are the main clients
- ericmay 4mo agoWhy do they use a VPN?
- esseph 4mo agoChinese state firewall?
- weird-eye-issue 4mo agoWell not just that, OpenAI explicitly blocks them
- prodigycorp 4mo agoHow realistic is this: Chinese models incidentally slurps up some terms that lead them to finding unflattering words that you wrote about the CCP in a random journal entry, or maybe a social media csv export. You go to China one day and are denied entry due to what you said. Realistic or no? (yes i know the us is getting bad in re. to what you write online as well) Models hosted in China are a siren call that I don't feel bad about resisting.
- vasco 4mo agohttps://immpolicytracking.org/policies/reported-french-scientist-denied-entry-after-phone-search-revealed-messages-critical-of-trump/ https://immpolicytracking.org/policies/reported-french-scien... > CBP denies travelers entry because of anti-Trump comments
- dubcanada 4mo agoThis statement makes no sense, because you literally said the "US is getting bad". We already gave up all of our data, if you wrote something about the CCP you should already expect they know about it.
- znpy 4mo agoBesides that, the us govt already has all your data and yet people are criticising it all around, in the open. They can, without repercussions, because the us is a free country. Chinese people can’t really do the same.
- wg0 4mo agoThat's deliberate. US AI companies have no chance of recouping even fraction of their valuations. PS: Have not tried this but Deepseev4 Flash (not even Deepseekv4 Pro version) with set to "high" has pretty much Claud Opus 4.7 level of capabilities and is lightening fast and dirty cheap. Hours and hours of conversation barely costs few cents.
- surgical_fire 4mo agoI have been using DeepSeek API within Claude Code. So far it has been legitimately superior to Claude, and Codex that I used before.
- giwook 4mo agoAnecdotal evidence is nice but hard to take seriously given the myriad variables at play here.
- Arcuru 4mo agoI am very happy with DSv4 for their price/performance but neither of them are comparable to Opus.
- tartoran 4mo agoBut they're overall a good thing for us consumers even if we'll never use these models, it forces the prices down all around.
- chillfox 4mo agoYeah, I really like and use DSv4Pro for personal projects, but I also use Opus all the time at work and they are definitively not at the same level. I can only conclude that people who claim they are aren't doing anything close to the edge of what these models are capable of or any niche things. I would say DSv4Pro is around the same level as Sonnet.
- bel8 4mo agoDeepSeek Flash on high (not max) is a freak of nature indeed. Very disproportionate intelligence-to-cost ratio. I'm leveraging this temporary anomaly and using it as my coding workhorse.
- nh43215rgb 4mo agoSo exactly same as deepseek 4 api pricing
- bel8 4mo agoOne difference is that MiMo 2.5 (non-Pro) has image, audio and video input capabilities. DeepSeek does not understand image, audio or video.
- indigodaddy 4mo agoI've heard non-Pro isn't nearly as good for coding as Pro?
- UncleOxidant 4mo agoIs this deepseek v4 api pricing for May (at 75% off - offer supposedly end June 1)? Or the non-discounted api pricing?
- nh43215rgb 4mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48237663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48237663 Deepseek made the discounted price permanent before this.
- admiralrohan 4mo agoEveryone already said what I wanted to say. That all US companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, MS Copilot) have increased price recently while Chinese companies (Deepseek, Xiaomi) are reducing price. The question is how they are managing to do so? They are supposed to struggle due to chip sanctions. Secondly, why now? The US companies were supposed to subsidize too but now they are unable to keep up. Everyone going to usage based pricing, so it's unsustainable for them. They are well funded too. If there are genuine hardware breakthrough reducing compute needs then that is good for the whole world I believe.
- tartoran 4mo agoCompetition I guess, they must be burning some resources to make this price reduction happen...
- lostmsu 4mo agoThe state of the art models (mostly GPT 5.5, but also Gemini and Claude) are better so they cost more. Qwen 3.7 Max is their only direct competition and it is not any cheaper.
- surgical_fire 4mo agoAre they? I have been using DeepSeek, and I am finding it better than Claude or Codex, to be honest. I don't see myself going back.
- c0rruptbytes 4mo agoI love ds4, us models are better imo, but like 5% not 500% better, so the valuation doesn't really make sense that being said, deepseek v4 needs to be on amazon bedrock to actually be feasible in the US Enterprise market and start driving other provider prices down
- vessenes 4mo ago> They are supposed to struggle due to chip sanctions As Jensen has been pointing out for almost a year now, these sanctions were ineffective and probably had the opposite effect of the desired goal. The history is fairly long, but an inflection point could likely be traced to Trump v1 era DOJ enforcement on (among others) Huawei's CFO Meng Wanzhou in 2018. Huawei was hit with the (really big) stick in international transactions: OFAC violation accusations, and it was a seminal moment in the company's internal operations -- they concluded they needed a fully internal supply chain in China, and retooled for it. Meng Wanzhou cases in the US were eventually dismissed, but she was on house arrest in Canada through 2021 or so. Fast forward to 2024 -- Huawei was culturally and technically ready to build AI accelerators -- one of the externalities of the sanctions was to provide additional benefit to Chinese companies for buying from Huawei; those economics seem to have provided a boost to on-shore development.
- sim04ful 4mo ago"The api pricing for mimo-v2-pro and mimo-v2-omni remain unchanged" could we presume this means the discount isn't from hardware improvement or availability ?
- lostmsu 4mo agoThe price cut is 50%.
- irthomasthomas 4mo agoInsane. 3 points behind opus on the artificialanalysis index. Mimo cost ~$400 at the old price, so about $40 today. Opus cost ~$5000 That's over 100x cheaper, and just 3 points behind. I can't wait to experiment with an llm consortium of 100 deepseek and mimo models. Crazy times. Shut up and take my m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ data! Edit: Gemini on google search told me I could write strikethrough text on hn using <s>. Mimo told me it was unsupported and then went on to list some tags that are supported, like <b>bold</b>. I tried copy pasting the word in strikethrough from a word processor but it lost the format. I ended up using mimo in an agent shell wrapper to produce it, and copy pasting from the terminal worked for some reason.
- noman-land 4mo agoWhat did MiMo say?
- irthomasthomas 4mo agoSays its not supported and lists a few tags that are, like <b>bold</b> Does this work: s̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶
- noman-land 4mo agoWell done. Unicode wins again. 𓂺
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- maxdo 4mo agobenchmarks we deserve: google search quick ai answers vs full llm model :)
- irthomasthomas 4mo agosearch answers use Flash 3.5
- dzonga 4mo agoas someone from the 3rd world - this is pleasant - even 3rd world countries will have affordable "A.I" access via Chinese models. as someone who now lives & has lived in the west for the majority of their adult life - yeah the US western models r fucked n the crazy valuations of the A.I labs - which also filters down to the economy - since all money instead of being put to productive use is being wasted on this shit. hell electricity bills are up - cz datacenters need power. the current crooks in power don't believe in clean energy.
- catlikesshrimp 4mo ago>>as someone from the 3rd world - this is pleasant - even 3rd world countries will have affordable "A.I" I stopped tagging my country as developing and then third world and call it for what it is, a POOR country. I know with increasing certainty that my country will be poor for the rest of my life. I also expect AI to be as available as computers: there are the "have", and there are the "don't have", which is almost always a lifetime condition.
- dzonga 4mo agoI will adopt your take. it's precise.
- sourcecodeplz 4mo agoYou can use Codex as an orchestrator and claude code via mimo/deepseek api as executor. I've read this a lot before but when you really try it, it is really something in the way you can stretch your credits.
- admiralrohan 4mo agoThe token plan is confusing. From their docs "After using 10M input (cache miss) tokens of MiMo-V2.5-Pro, it is equivalent to consuming 3000M Credits, and you can still enjoy 1100M Credits of MiMo-V2.5". So it's around 12M input credit vs Earlier 60M tokens.
- 827a 4mo agoHot take: The reason this is happening is because the market for Chinese AI models hosted by Chinese companies is struggling. Even the market for Chinese AI models hosted by western companies is soft: During the week of May 18, OpenRouter processed 3.4T DeepSeek v3 Flash tokens (their most popular model). Google has announced that Gemini is processing 746T per week; Claude is probably processing more. And the Chinese models were already staggeringly cheap, far cheaper than most Gemini, Claude, or GPT models, before this recent array of pricing changes. Broadly: No one is using the Chinese AI models. Everyone, globally, everywhere, including in China, is using the models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The models from the Big Three western labs represent >80% of all tokens processed and likely >95% of all revenue.
- runako 4mo ago> OpenRouter processed 3.4T DeepSeek v3 Flash > Gemini is processing 746T per week I read this totally differently. A startup nobody really knows is doing half a percent of Google on a commodity task?!? Google, which puts Gemini on billions of devices by default, without the user asking? Google, which is distributing Gemini to users who are unaware they are even using it? Versus a startup that does not even have a login button on its homepage? This is astonishing.
- 827a 4mo agoUnfortunately, the market doesn't generally let you buy Blackwells with "we got half a percent of Google's marketshare with a model we're literally giving away for free [1]". You need that thing we call Capital. But, they may certainly opt to have it written on their gravestone, as Google is (checks notes) continuing to put Gemini on billions of devices and doing quadrillions of tokens per month. [1] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash:free https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash:free
- runako 4mo agoThis is a bizarre comment for a couple of reasons. First, obviously everyone involved understands that someone has to pay to provide a free service. Everyone involved also knows that this sometimes makes sense as a business strategy (I have not paid to ship anything from Amazon for close to two decades). Second, OpenRouter's business model specifically does not require them to run all (any?) of the models available through the platform. Provider is one of the choices when you choose a model, and each provider can have separate pricing. The link you posted shows only one provider, Crucible. That may/may not be affiliated with OpenRouter? Even assuming an affiliation, it's opaque who is subsidizing this usage. Is it OpenRouter or Crucible? All of this is somewhat of a distraction. Even if someone gave search away for free (like Google), it would still be an accomplishment to get to half a percent of Google's volume. Or to sell half a percent of the volume of Android phones. Or whatever. Kudos to the OpenRouter team!
- skeledrew 4mo agoThese reductions as Microsoft and Uber say AI is too expensive. The play is right there.
- h4kunamata 4mo agoAnything to destroy US tech companies is welcome. They aren't aiming companies but users which many have no common sense and grant these agentic AI access to everything. All the restrictions the US imposed to CH, will be reverted back and it will be even worse, because now the data is not reaching the US gov ( we all know they have access to US big techs data ) but CH. I really hope this goes viral and breaks Nvidia/OpenAI.
- ffitch 4mo agofun fact, CH is an ISO code of Switzerland, and China is CN
- weird-eye-issue 4mo agoI even know the reasoning but CH for Switzerland always bothers me
- eldho123 4mo agoThe industry seems to be moving from "best model wins" toward "good enough model at lowest cost wins."
- throwa356262 4mo agoIt is a combination of 3 things 1. Some companies are very good in training and serving at much lower cost 2. Some companies have access to new much cheaper hardware 3. People have realzeid that you dont need a 3.2T model when a 310B one (Opus vs MiMo 2.5) performs equally well for your particular task.
- sidrag22 4mo agojust wondering when the overwhelming consensus among devs is just gonna be that companies should go horizontal instead of vertical. I feel 5.5 is 100% good enough for literally anything i could point it at, and its shortcomings are largely gonna be paired to not grasping wider context it can't really load into a context window to correct (not understanding when a user is gonna miss something that might be implied knowledge at that stage or similar issues). So, at this stage of time I'm not even totally looking at lesser models to save costs or usage, im using lesser models because they fit the task more than fine and will nail it. Instead though, 6 months from now the model landscape will be totally different, costs will not have gotten better(for US companies), because their priorities are almost entirely on chasing capability of models. So i hope you're right and the overall market is moving the direction you mention, but I think the US will continue this absurd race to... just being #1 regardless of how much it stops making sense.
- red-iron-pine 4mo ago> good enough model at lowest cost wins that has been the model of software since, like, ever
- alfiedotwtf 4mo agoI just wish there was a MiMo REAP gguf that was reduced enough to fit within RAM of computers of mere mortals
- isityettime 4mo agoLooks like this is basically to mostly match (or slightly undercut, in the case of MiMo-v2.5-Pro) DeepSeek's pricing for DSV4-Pro and DSV4-Flash. This seems great! Between just these two providers, this is a couple pairs of models that seem suitable for replacing Claude Sonnet and Claude Haiku, at around 1/20th the price. It's a bummer for me that nothing can match at least Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.5 yet, since I'd characterize those as the first models to actually be good enough to be useful for writing code, at least in my experience at work. But for simple stuff, or situations where you can have the huge model dispatch to subagents or just "advise" or "supervise" smaller agents on their work, this looks great. Wherever the frontier models end up in a year, if there are open-weight contenders like this around GPT-5.5's level by then, I think I can be happy and productive doing most prototyping with those models and hand-editing for quality or more serious work.
- Alifatisk 4mo agoNow, their subscription (especially Lite plan) look very entriguing. $6 for 4.1 billion credits per month. For Mimo 2.5 Pro, 1 token = 2 credits, for Mimo 2.5, 1 token = 1 credit. Still, that's a good deal. Reminds me a lot of Z.ai Christmas deal with their Lite plan.