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.
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 ...
Model | | Input | Output | Cache Read
------------------------------------|----------------|-----------------------------|---------------------|-----------------
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)
EDIT: formatting
Right now, they give 4100 credits for Luna and 63 000 for Deepseek on their prepaid plan (both are 2x)
But DeepSeek v4 Pro is a far more capable model and still cheaper than anything that it competes with, from what I can see.
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.