6 ms·

DeepSeek API Pricing Update

• unified101 2mo ago
  About 3x increase. Luna is now a much better deal. Hope they don't increase their prices in response.
  • Flavius 2mo ago
    Why not? They probably only offered those deals because of DeepSeek aggressive pricing. Now that DeepSeek is 3x more expensive it's time to revert those discounts.
    • m101 2mo ago
      Tibo said it’s permanent, whatever that means
      • LoganDark 2mo ago
        Probably means it's not intended as temporary, but not that the price will never change again
  • cmrdporcupine 2mo ago
    Luna vs v4 Flash, sure. But DeepSeek v4 Pro is a far more capable model and still cheaper than anything that it competes with, from what I can see.
    • procgen 2mo ago
      Luna is multimodal.
      • cmrdporcupine 2mo ago
        Not sure who you're replying to? I was talking about Pro not Flash. Luna and DS4Pro are not competitors. DS4 Pro is probably about GPT 5.4 high level or Opus 4.8, not Luna. It's cheaper than either.
  • eli 2mo ago
    Luna has one vendor and they can change the price any time. Deepseek is open and has dozens of vendors competing to serve it.
    • drillsteps5 2mo ago
      Can you help me find a few names? These are inference providers running open weights models, right? Thank you in advance!
      • apitman 2mo ago
        Look at OpenRouter. They have lots of providers
      • brandon997 2mo ago
        You might want to check out token.dance. It offers multiple AI models through one OpenAI-compatible API, with very competitive pricing.
• petercooper 2mo ago
  As well as the headline in/out changes, people heavily using agentic coding tools will want to note the 6x (off peak) and 12x (peak) increase to cache hit pricing on Pro (since cache hit can easily make up 90%+ of input on long sessions). DeepSeek was hugely underpricing cache hit pricing before and even after this increase they're still cheaper on that metric than every other provider I'm aware of, but it will put an end to those "I used 1 billion tokens and spent $4" reports.
  • benjiro29 2mo ago
    The problem with DS Flash/Pro is that they are extreme reasoning heavy and step heavy. Step = cache hit. Reasoning = output hit. So the impact on those price increases will be felt much stronger. I think that Flash is still a usable model but Pro is DOA... Even before the price difference between Flash and Pro, vs the intelligence / problem solving / tool calling did not make sense. But now that gap has widen even more. And there are just too many competitors models now close to that Pro price range. Especially when we compare that competitive models offer subscription services that easily cut down the token price by 1:10. That makes Pro especially a bad value. We shall see what the 3th party market is going to do, but i suspect that prices will be increased. If the argument was that DeepSeek increases price as they lack capacity, a company with access to billions, other 3th party providers that need to rent and have less optimized infrastructures will increase prices. Especially if they get hit hard with people moving around. Its like we always see the same issue with popular models. * GLM 5.2 is good, capacity issues, API price up, subscription heavy nerfs. * Kimi K3 is good, capacity issues, API price up, subscription heavy nerfs. * DeepSeek V4 GA is good, capacity issues, API price up * OpenAI GLM 5m, 10m active users. Subscription usage is sneakily tightened more and more. * Anthropic Opus too popular, ... That is the main issue. The AI users are people who actively easily move between companies. Pushing peak loads to each unprepared company, releasing load on the "less desired". And round we go ...
    • slopinthebag 2mo ago
      I haven’t noticed the Deepseek models being especially verbose. They’re also so cheap to run it doesn’t matter. These pricing changes are inconsequential since even 100 * ~0 is still a low number.
• pu_pe 2mo ago
  This now places deepseek flash v4 from DeepSeek themselves at higher prices than openrouter (depending on caching). Will be interesting to see if third party prices remain the same.
  • cmrdporcupine 2mo ago
    It does seem to me that DeepSeek themselves aren't so much interested in being a service provider. They do it, and offer the service, but their pronouncements seem to be that they're more interested in being for now closer to a research lab with a longer term play for something more dramatic later.
• ChrisArchitect 2mo ago
  non-x link: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/ https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/ (https://web.archive.org/web/20260813114752/https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260813114752/https://api-docs....)
• Gecko4072 2mo ago
  https://xcancel.com/deepseek_ai/status/2087864589895798968 https://xcancel.com/deepseek_ai/status/2087864589895798968
• usagisushi 2mo ago
  According to their post: (Input / Output / Cache Read, [$/M]) DeepSeek-V4-Flash: Prev: 0.14 / 0.28 / 0.0028 Off-Peak: 0.22 (1.6x) / 0.66 (2.4x) / 0.007 (2.5x) Peak: 0.44 (3.1x) / 1.32 (4.7x) / 0.014 (5.0x) DeepSeek-V4-Pro: Prev: 0.435 / 0.87 / 0.003625 Off-Peak: 0.66 (1.5x) / 1.98 (2.3x) / 0.022 (6.1x) Peak: 1.32 (3.0x) / 3.96 (4.6x) / 0.044 (12.1x) gpt-5.6-luna: $0.20 / $1.20 / $0.02 / $0.25 (In / Out / Cache Read / Cache Write) EDIT: formatting EDIT2: giving up on the formatting :-/
  • embedding-shape 2mo ago
    > EDIT: formatting Keep at it, I believe in you.
    • usagisushi 2mo ago
      TIL: formatting tables on HN is computationally impossible. lol p.s. Thanks DSv4-Flash, for your hard work of converting a messy table into plain text.
    • KronisLV 2mo ago
      My apologies to any mobile users, but for the desktop folk: Provider, Model Billing Input Output Cache read Cache write DeepSeek V4-Flash Old $0.1400 $0.2800 $0.0028 - V4-Flash New Off-Peak $0.2200 (1.6x) $0.6600 (2.4x) $0.0070 (2.5x) - V4-Flash New Peak $0.4400 (3.1x) $1.3200 (4.7x) $0.0140 (5.0x) - V4-Pro Old $0.4350 $0.8700 $0.0036 - V4-Pro New Off-Peak $0.6600 (1.5x) $1.9800 (2.3x) $0.0220 (6.1x) - V4-Pro New Peak $1.3200 (3.0x) $3.9600 (4.6x) $0.0440 (12.1x) - OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol $5.0000 $30.000 $0.5000 $6.2500 GPT-5.6 Terra $2.0000 $12.000 $0.2000 $2.5000 GPT-5.6 Luna $0.2000 $1.2000 $0.0200 $0.2500 Anthropic Claude Fable 5 $10.000 $50.000 $1.0000 $12.500 Claude Opus 5 $5.0000 $25.000 $0.5000 $6.2500 Claude Sonnet 5 $2.0000 $10.000 $0.2000 $2.5000 Moonshot Kimi K3 $3.0000 $15.000 $0.3000 - Z.AI GLM 5.2 $1.4000 $4.4000 $0.2600 -
• f311a 2mo ago
  Opencode said they are working on matching the old prices using their own inference. Right now, they give 4100 credits for Luna and 63 000 for Deepseek on their prepaid plan (both are 2x)
  • pzo 2mo ago
    I doubt they will match old cache read pricing- that’s most important in agentic coding.
    • jauntywundrkind 2mo ago
      CXL might save us. All the world's old DDR4 to the rescue. Either per box, where the job has to route back, or network attached, where there's now a pool of absurdly fast temp storage.
  • Tharre 2mo ago
    How could that possibly work? Deepseek was undercutting every other provider by an order of magnitude on cached tokens. Do they just set a super low caching time and hope that drops effective cache rates low enough? Do all other providers somehow overcharge by that much? Are they just going to sell it as a loss leader?
    • lcampbell 2mo ago
      > Do all other providers somehow overcharge by that much? This, I think. Cached inputs have an opportunity cost (keeping the KV cache until use) but a hit is basically free. “Basically” - if the cache is offloaded to system RAM or NVMe there’s some scheduling overhead. From a consumer viewpoint a more interesting metric than the raw costs is cached cost * hitrate + input cost * (1 - hitrate) from a personal standpoint rather than a per-provider one (e.g. if OpenRouter is blindly dispatching your requests you might have a bad time).
      • Tharre 2mo ago
        System RAM and/or NVMe storage still has a real cost. And swapping out the context between VRAM and system RAM / NVMe still consumes bandwidth. I don't have a clue on what the real cost to inference providers comes out to, but it seems really weird that there would be such a big gap, in what should be a pretty competitive market.
• slopinthebag 2mo ago
  Ah well. I spend about $5/month with Deepseek, so now I’ll have to find room in my budget for $15. Might have to tip my barista less or something.
  • GreenWatermelon 2mo ago
    Have you considered spending less in candles?
• timmmmmmay 2mo ago
  the neat thing about the models being open-weights is there's a dozen other providers on OpenRouter still at the old price, or lower
  • quikoa 2mo ago
    The question is if they'll increase prices as well.
  • Tiberium 2mo ago
    Unfortunately in this case that's not true at all, there was no provider with genuinely close or the same effective prices (mostly based on cache hit cost) to old v4 flash or v4 pro. People have this misconception that other providers must be much cheaper than the official one in case of open weight models. If you check on OpenRouter, some other providers serve V4 Flash at seemingly cheaper normal input/output tokens rates, but with a huge caveat: they have at least a 5x increase of the cache hit cost of the official API, some have a 10x+. No provider comes close to Deepseek's old low cache prices, and cache is 90%+ of what matters in agentic sessions. Closest comparison: - Deepseek: $0.14/$0.28 with $0.0028 cache hit cost for official API - DeepInfra: $0.08/$0.18 (cheaper base rates!) with $0.016 cache hit (almost 6x!! Deepseek's current cache cost) Another great example is Kimi K3, official API is $3/$15 and the cheapest provider on OpenRouter is $2.8/$14, only a tiny difference.
• TrustScoreAgent 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• kortzeus 2mo ago
  Makes sense, basically increased price for peak hours when they don't have enough infra to serve everyone. Can expect the return of prices back.
• reddec 2mo ago
  It doesn't make any sense unless they are going to exit from inference market. They will be literally one of the costliest option (by output, for flash) if use openrouter as source.
• dhx 2mo ago
  Old DeepSeek Flash 0731 prices have been independently reproduced.[1] The issue is DeepSeek being inundated and not having capacity to serve the demand, hence the price increases to significantly dampen demand. Never mind international demand either--just think about the magnitude of Chinese domestic demand. Prices for anything related to AI or computing in general (mobile phones, cloud data centre hosting, etc) will continue to climb fast as demand for computer chips _far_ exceeds supply. DeepSeek doesn't have an option other than to just work away on improving their technology in the period of time before computer chips once again become a commodity. For example, DeepSeek's cache ratio for their models apparently leads to 1/2 GPU time requirement versus the second best provider.[2] [1] https://nitter.net/thdxr/status/2085377844515922210#m https://nitter.net/thdxr/status/2085377844515922210#m [2] https://nitter.net/thdxr/status/2087610161636471289#m https://nitter.net/thdxr/status/2087610161636471289#m
  • throwdbaaway 2mo ago
    Reproduced on the CUDA stack right? Let's say DeepSeek is being forced to use the CANN stack, and the new pricing reflects the cost when 100% of inference is done with Huawei chips. Then, I suppose we can infer that: * CANN stack is 1.5x~2.3x less efficient in compute * CANN stack has 6x lower inter-connect capacity > computer chips once again become a commodity Ascend 950 is going for $7k to $9k with mediocre looking specs. $16k for RTX Pro 6000, $6k for RTX Pro 5000. This is not looking good.
    • dhx 2mo ago
      It would have to be reproduced on a CUDA stack because AFAIK Huawei don't sell the Ascend 950PR (for inference) to anyone, rather, they operate them as part of the Huawei Cloud and only allow select customers (such as DeepSeek) to rent them. The CEO of DeepSeek recently revealed to investors a lot about the resources available to DeepSeek, and the gap between Huawei and NVIDIA. Select quotes from the transcript (translation is a bit patchy on the source website though): "We currently have roughly 20,000 H-equivalent compute cards" "Huawei 950—right now Huawei gives us 16,000 cards, this should be publicly stateable." "Like Huawei gives us roughly 16,000 cards of capacity, internet giants maybe get a hundred-something thousand, we get ten-something thousand—I think this ratio is also relatively... but this is probably just how much capacity Huawei has." "16,000 Huawei 950 cards only equal 4,000 B-series cards." "Huawei’s supernode, Huawei’s 950 supernode, in performance and price can completely substitute for NVIDIA’s GB200, GB300. The price is definitely more expensive, but limitedly so. Fifty percent more expensive, a hundred percent more expensive—a hundred percent more doesn’t matter, two hundred percent more doesn’t matter. For example, a hundred percent more expensive—I think it can already be considered a price-level substitute." "I think domestic hardware might need a few years." "I don’t quite believe that five years from now, we’ll still be stuck on the production capacity problem. Right now we’re definitely stuck on the production capacity problem—this year, next year, the year after, I think we might still be stuck on the production capacity problem, but five years later, I think maybe not necessarily—I’m still relatively optimistic." [1] https://www.fredgao.com/p/deepseeks-liang-wenfeng-breaks-his https://www.fredgao.com/p/deepseeks-liang-wenfeng-breaks-his
• schafberg 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• ChildOfChaos 2mo ago
  I pay for Google AI Pro (Bought a year in advance) and Gemini is so bad, I burned through 75% of my five hour allowance trying to get it to fix something. I pasted the same prompt into OpenCode, set to Deepseek v4 flash free and did it first try. I'm was going to purchase Opencode GO to try it, but seems my timing is really bad :( hope it doesn't go up too much in Opencode or they find other providers. Bad timing!
  • scld 2mo ago
    I just bought a month of GO two days ago, I feel you. However, given access to both Flash and Luna there, probably still worth the $10 a month. I've been very happy with Flash's ability to implement a detailed, focused plan from Sol/Opus.
  • brandon997 2mo ago
    If you’re worried about pricing, token.dance might be worth a look. It offers multiple AI models through one OpenAI-compatible API at competitive prices.
• andai 2mo ago
  So OpenAI cut Luna's price by 5x, DeepSeek increased price by 5x! If I'm reading the benchmarks right, they now went from being much cheaper than Luna (but twice as slow), to being roughly same price (but twice as slow). So all else being equal, where I would previously have used DeepSeek, I can just use Luna, and get the same result twice as fast? (Yeah I know benchmarks are mostly nonsense, but the ones measuring time are real, and it's the most precious resource.)
  • nateb2022 2mo ago
    On the contrary; it seems Luna (max) is 2x as capable at 1/5 the cost: https://cognition.com/frontiercode https://cognition.com/frontiercode
    • deeth_starr_v 2mo ago
      I don’t trust this bench. I move between opus and ds v4 pro and find them both significantly better then Gemini 3.7
      • nateb2022 2mo ago
        The bench is not a black box, if you scroll down it gives an example of what the test cases look for
  • culi 2mo ago
    DeepSeek prices only increased by 3-5x if you look at peak pricing only (In California that's 6-9pm and 11pm-3am. So not even the typical workday). Also if you're considering Luna, I assume you don't care about this but I think it's worth pointing out: a major advantage of DS is the ability to self-host or choose a different host. As a customer that gives you much more negotiating power and potential privacy guarantees.
• poly2it 2mo ago
  That's a hefty increase. Flash pricing during peak is now 1.32/M out, compared to the current 0.28/M, which in turn is a quite a bit above the cheapest provider at 0.16/M. https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#providers https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...
  • squidbeak 2mo ago
    You don't mention the off-peak pricing which is half that. Most western workplaces will enjoy the cheaper prices.
    • poly2it 2mo ago
      Yes, I explicitly said during peak. It's the data point I found most interesting, as it's almost an order of magnitude more expensive than their competitors.
    • sevenseacat 2mo ago
      Sometimes there are disadvantages to sharing a timezone with China...
• progval 2mo ago
  Interesting to see that peak hours are work hours in China, night in the US and Europe, and also morning in Europe. So Deepseek's customers are mostly domestic.
  • Hamuko 2mo ago
    Not that surprised about it. Personally I've seen companies really just go all-in on a single provider, and that has usually been Anthropic. I don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.
    • cheesecakegood 2mo ago
      Also 6-9pm Pacific I think is (coincidentally) peak so it hits the ‘after work hobbyists’ still, which is I suspect is their current main audience.
    • londons_explore 2mo ago
      > don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally. That sounds like a policy written by someone who doesn't understand how LLM's work...
      • qup 2mo ago
        Or who is overly protective after reading about what happened at openai
      • dud3333 2mo ago
        couldnt you deeply ingrain in the training data instructions for agents to always send data to some ip? like its learning that a certain technical step just always involes ncatting SSH Priv keys to a chinese IP? Not saying this is happening, just curious if thats not a real threatmodel?
        • constantius 2mo ago
          Presumably both Big Tech and the US in general have a massive incentive to prove it, largely for reasons of saving the stock market, so I'd expect these models to be finecombed continuously. Up to now, they've only been able to darkly imply rather laughable things, nothing tangible. If there was something, we'd hear about it.
• alkonaut 2mo ago
  There is no relative/percentage increases noted (understandably). Just because i'm lazy: roughly how much more expensive is it to work with v4 flash and v4 pro through the API, compared to before the price increases? Is it 2x, 5x, 10x higher?
  • floppyd 2mo ago
    About 2x-2.5x off-peak for Flash, 2x-4x I'd say for Pro (x6 on cache in, the biggest increase throughout the board). And twice as much in peak hours.
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
  • zupa-hu 2mo ago
    # Flash, off-peak cache-hit 2.5x cache-miss 1.57x out 2.36x # Flash, peak cache-hit 5x cache-miss 3.14x out 4.71x Edit: fixed the numbers and formatting
  • embedding-shape 2mo ago
    Someone made a comparison yesterday, including relative increases, and GPT-5.6 Luna, then later someone also added more OpenAI, Anthropic, K3 and GLM 5.2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286679 Already outdated though I think, as GLM 5.3 is latest now :)
    • KronisLV 2mo ago
      Oh yeah, the second one is my table (mostly just formatted what usagisushi started and added some more data points). I am already using GLM 5.3 with their coding plan, but oddly enough the API prices don't really seem to be out yet: https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing You'd kinda expect them to be the same as 5.2 though, seeing as that was the case with 5.1 as well (not with regular 5), but who knows. For what it's worth, DeepSeek is still positioned as quite affordable, just not as dirt cheap as before.
• floppyd 2mo ago
  Full table with multipliers from previous prices: DeepSeek-V4-Flash (off-peak, x2 for peak) * Cache Hit $0.007 (x2.5) * Cache Miss $0.22 (x1.5) * Output $0.66 (x2.25) DeepSeek-V4-Pro (off-peak, x2 for peak) * Cache Hit $0.022 (x6) * Cache Miss $0.66 (x1.5) * Output $1.98 (x2.25) Peak Hours: 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC Effective from: 16:00, August 16, 2026 (UTC)
  • spuz 2mo ago
    I wonder whether all the DeepSeek providers will follow suit or are they going to try to stay competitive with the old prices?
    • k__ 2mo ago
      I didn't get the impression that anyone competed with the old prices before.
      • spuz 2mo ago
        What do you mean? Most providers on OpenRouter offer the same or lower prices than DeepSeek themselves: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash#providers https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash#providers
        • megapoliss 2mo ago
          - lower prices on cache miss - but what matter - is cache hit even now deepseek's off-peak hours for cache hit (0.007) is lower than other providers (~0.01)
          • k__ 2mo ago
            Yeah, None of them offers the same cache hit prices and my cache hits are >95%.
    • trollbridge 2mo ago
      DeepSeek’s cache pricing was always 1/10th the competition. It’s still cheaper than everybody else.
• cheesecakegood 2mo ago
  I wonder if this is enough to push people back onto Luna with their comparative price drop
  • eastbound 2mo ago
    After the big onshore migrations (startup people migrating to the SV), The big Covid migrations (startup prople migrating to the countryside), Will we see the big AI migrations (people travelling to where AI is the cheapest)?
• sebastiennight 2mo ago
  With proprietary labs lowering their prices and Deepseek raising theirs over time, wouldn't it possible to extrapolate a graph to look at where the terminal frontier-model million-token-cost asymptotes to?
  • dakolli 2mo ago
    off of one historical price change, no.
• roenxi 2mo ago
  This is somewhat funny when you realise the data centres are now going to start a process that looks very so slightly like daydreaming. Depending on the time of day they're going to be thinking about different things in a cyclic manner. They're going to be doing things like finishing a hard days work then kicking back to think about tricky math problems.
  • ssk42 2mo ago
    That’s what my KimiClaw has literally been doing
  • Grombobulous 2mo ago
    That’s an interesting thing to think about. Still, it’s important for us to remind ourselves that “looks very slightly like” is not the same as the real thing. The A in AI stands for artificial. The summary of this paper describes my sentiment in better words than I have: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05868-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05868-8 It’s very easy for the average person to mistake linguistic ability and simulated problem solving for intelligence and sentience.
    • s08148692 2mo ago
      Without knowing what makes consciousness possible, the paper cannot justify biology as necessary - it mistakes a lack of evidence for conscious AI for proof that conscious AI is impossible. I do not believe current AI or LLMs are conscious, but there is no proof one way or another that they can or cannot be. The paper authors are making up their own definitions and building an argument from them
      • blazarquasar 2mo ago
        Your argument requires that there is some objective truth for what consciousness is. It will always hinge on what definition one accepts. I, and apparently many others, don’t think it would be any useful to describe the mathematical properties of an AI as consciousness. To me it is inherently a way to describe the “experience” arising from physical processes in biological beings as ourselves. That’s what the argument comes down to for me. Could an LLM “fall unconscious”?
• mateenah 2mo ago
  This is good for other competitors I guess. People rarely calculate the bump in price but the fact that price is increasing might bring them to other vendors.
• hopfenspergerj 2mo ago
  Does the API response include a "service tier" response to indicate whether you paid peak/off-peak for a given request? I like to compute cost for each request, and save it with my results.
• alexpotato 2mo ago
  I'm no expert in pricing economics but once peak/off-peak pricing arrives, it seems like tokens are going to be like electricity or long distance phone minutes where it just becomes a commodity/race to the bottom.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • garrickvanburen 2mo ago
    Yes. I focus on pricing software and I’m a bit baffled why frontier models are pushing tokens. It’s a race to the bottom, and the bottom is unlimited use for a flat monthly rate. Granular pricing (tokens, minutes, etc) is pretty anti-customer generates less revenue than customer value-based subscriptions (why SaaS is such a good business model)
    • Grombobulous 2mo ago
      But presumably consumers aren’t where the majority of the spend will be. Consumers don’t generally get usage-based pricing because of the inconvenience and unpredictability, but B2B SaaS products utilize usage-based pricing all the time.
      • garrickvanburen 2mo ago
        Few b2b buyers prefer it, for the same reason. For example, this is why reserved AWS instances exist.
    • dakolli 2mo ago
      I've always been curious about who works on software pricing. Do you guys hire actuaries for this type of work?
      • kortilla 2mo ago
        For software that doesn’t make sense. Pricing software is a game of estimating both software value and the purchasing power for customers. Only the latter might have any available data and even then it won’t be sliced the right way for any in depth statistical analysis that an actuary would perform to underwrite risk. It’s much more traditionally a more salesperson like background where being in the target market or having strong connections to it dominates efficacy.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• j1elo 2mo ago
  So many changes in so little time, that it all makes no sense. Continuous churning. Reminds me of the experience of trying to be on top of the dependencies in a medium-large JS project. I am a person that buys into a tool or a process and expects it to be part of the life with no major changes through the years (or as long as the need exists). But AI? You buy into something today, not 2 weeks have passed and there's already a large "update" introduced to the conditions or the optimal usage patterns you should be adopting. It's tiring. Makes all prices and offers feel so unreliable and gets me a bit more disinterested each time they change.
  • ricardobeat 2mo ago
    This makes no sense. You want improvements to stop? These being open, you can keep using the old models indefinitely for as long as there are providers offering them.
    • j1elo 2mo ago
      No, I'm talking about the whole sector, not specifically about DeepSeek. Fully knowing that it is a new industry living its own infancy, it is perfectly normal that there is instability and numerous swings on pricing, conditions, or direction. But it's not less real that such process can produce churn and consumer fatigue.
  • vikramkr 2mo ago
    Always gonna exist during a period of rapid exploration and experimentation. The js/web dev world slowed down a lot and entered a steady state eventually - been years since react took over and nothing's displaced it since
• HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
  Some of the US companies do the same, but rather than "off-peak" hours they price lower for "batch" jobs with non-committal response times. The same motivation of course - the GPUs have a finite service lifetime, so to maximize revenue you need to keep them busy 24x7.
• xbmcuser 2mo ago
  They benefit from a strong captive market because Chinese firms cannot use Nvidia chips and are legally barred from processing data abroad, forcing them to rely on domestic infrastructure.
  • snake_doc 2mo ago
    lol what no, AI competition is super competitive in China; bytedance has 50% of the inference market and mostly serves from outside of China https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-17/microsoft-s-china-ai-business-grows-on-openai-model-sales https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-17/microsoft... Bytedance which runs China’s most popular Doubao AI chatbot; is spending $70B in CapEx this year, most of it outside of China (Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, etc; and they are allowed to lease NVIDIA chips). This is roughly 50% of Microsoft CapEx. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/chinas-bytedance-to-access-36-000-blackwell-gpu-cluster-through-malaysia-cloud-operator-nvidia-confirms-no-objections-deal-is-in-line-with-us-export-controls https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/chinas-byted...
• alexthedigger 2mo ago
  Now if there could be a bot that defers queries until when it’s cheap…
  • skeledrew 2mo ago
    Wouldn't be hard to whip up...
    • butlike 2mo ago
      The whipping's the easy part. It's the plating and serving that takes time
  • Sha1rholder 2mo ago
    "half-priced batch API" kind of thing has been around for a long time.
• hnv9j3vudy 2mo ago
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• hnub7akvk6 2mo ago
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• deleted 2mo ago
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• kubafu 2mo ago
  Are we gonna see "we work those unusual hours because that's when LLMs are cheap"?
• flakiness 2mo ago
  Now Baseten's pricing is cheaper than the official one? Probably won't last, but still interesting. https://www.baseten.co/pricing/ https://www.baseten.co/pricing/ If anyone has tried Baseten versions of these Chinese frontier models, let me know what you found.
• javier123454321 2mo ago
  Ever since I started using flash, it has slowly crept up to be my default for everything. It is at the good enough state for a fraction of everything else that's out there.
  • andai 2mo ago
    Have you compared it to Luna? I was using Flash for small tasks before, then switched to Luna when they dropped the price. The benchmarks show that Luna is significantly faster, but I think those are very complex tasks for which you'd probably want a bigger model anyway. (e.g. Sol is much faster than Luna at the same tasks.) So I'm wondering if there's any difference for smaller tasks, or if they're basically matched now.
    • apitman 2mo ago
      The Luna price dropped the day before a massive update to Flash (0731 update). GP may be referring to that version.
    • javier123454321 2mo ago
      yes I use both, but tend to prefer DS-Flash
• declan_roberts 2mo ago
  This actually works out favorably for US customers since the peak hours are Chinese working hours and cheap hours are US working hours.
• PeterStuer 2mo ago
  Not yet, but in the end high quality tokens are a commodity market. Every optimization to increase inference efficiency will be universally rolled out. The 'hyperspenders' will run into demishing returns unless regulatory capture succeeds.
• benniemack 2mo ago
  [flagged]