DeepSeek API Pricing Update

mmfiguiere about 3 hours ago 22 commentsRead Article on twitter.com

ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

74% Positive

Analyzed from 763 words in the discussion.

Discussion (22 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

usagisushi•about 1 hour 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•42 minutes ago

> EDIT: formatting

Keep at it, I believe in you.

usagisushi•9 minutes 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.

petercooper•about 1 hour 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•26 minutes 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 ...

f311a•40 minutes 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•28 minutes ago

I doubt they will match old cache read pricing- that’s most important in agentic coding.

reddec•18 minutes 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.

kortzeus•28 minutes 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.

unified101•about 2 hours ago

About 3x increase. Luna is now a much better deal. Hope they don't increase their prices in response.

cmrdporcupine•about 1 hour 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.

Flavius•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour ago

Tibo said it’s permanent, whatever that means

LoganDark•40 minutes ago

Probably means it's not intended as temporary, but not that the price will never change again

timmmmmmay•36 minutes 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

Tiberium•29 minutes 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.

quikoa•29 minutes ago

The question is if they'll increase prices as well.

slopinthebag•39 minutes 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.

ChrisArchitect•about 1 hour ago

non-x link: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/ (https://web.archive.org/web/20260813114752/https://api-docs....)

pu_pe•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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.

Gecko4072•about 1 hour ago

https://xcancel.com/deepseek_ai/status/2087864589895798968