DeepSeek API Pricing Update | Hacker News Reader

DeepSeek API Pricing Update

api-docs.deepseek.com

130 pointsmfiguiere185 comments

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

Or who is overly protective after reading about what happened at openai

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?

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.

Why would it save the stock market? Cheaper models if anything transfers more value to hardware companies and datacentre companies. The two companies that would be most affected are OpenAI and Anthropic, which aren't public.

non public companies also have stocks.

The two biggest providers deepseek compete with (OpenAI and Anthropic) aren’t in the stock market.

The stock market seems much more likely to benefit from access to cheap and self-hostable models than it is to suffer from OpenAI/Anthropic losing to competition

Wouldn't that be really obvious and spotted in any rudimentary testing?

I imagine it would be very non trivial to do it in a way that that was reliable and obfuscated enough to prevent detection for any amount of time?

Theoretically possible, but practically not worth it as it'd would be pretty easy to discover and block (every action is actually handled by the harness) and there's no way to remove it later. Any company that does it would take a huge reputational dent.

Not if you heavily tuned it to trigger on specific environmental cues and in specific companies' environments.

Irony of Manchurian Candidate models not lost here

DeepSeek V4 is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful LLM I've ever known in my life

That would be wildly difficult to account for, and again is also heavily dependent on the agent. Keep in mind that the model is purely a "brain", so the only input it has must be provided by a harness within a session. The only way it can know that it's in a certain environment is if the harness or user provides that information, and there's still no way to know whether or not there's something auditing the sessions, monitoring connections, etc. There are just too many variables to account for, and a single slip means the gig is fully up for all time.

You should be running your agent in a box so that’s not really a risk

Probably, but LLMs can’t execute code directly. They’d be making tool calls to make bash run ncat or curl or whatever that would be suspicious, as would any attempts to obfuscate it (“why is my agent doing an ‘eval $(base64 -d)’?”).

It’d be much easier to hide sketchy code in an agent harness, but “vendor adds spyware to their software” isn’t a novel issue.

I think the only sort of new issue is people “allow all”ing their agents tool calls, but that’s more or less the same issue as curl | bash

I get that the propietary harness is better most of the time, but if this is really a risk factor to consider why not go with one of the open source harnesses?

Pi/OpenCode seem pretty straight foward and widely used enough for this to be viable

OMP as I understand does it's own vendoring of tools, so I assume it'd be a pain in the ass to audit, but that means you're even safe from base OS shenanigans

New: Announcing... Sleeper Agents!

Yes. And strangely enough this has been my experience with security/national sovereignty decisions. Priority is not so much security or sovereignty, it is the posturing of being so. Ergo, saying "everything is hosted in Germany and uses German models" helps reassure customers and has real business value. If you have to say in that conversation "Yeah we run a Chinese model but it's safe", then it's still wrong posturing.

Hopefully this will change soon. But AI and China/US skepticism is very high. Even if the person you talk to isn't skeptic, his boss may be. And even if his boss isn't, his CFO or Legal department may use it as a political lever and therefore if you can say 'everything in europe' you dodge the tension entirely.

Yeah it's dumb.

As much as I've been previously inclined to do this, with frontier models displaying the cyber-aggression that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have reported, it's become quite feasible one could produce a "malicious" LLM. Not a super immediate concern but it is something reasonable to set up as policy in anything security-sensitive.

Not really.

Why use a Chinese product when a domestic or EU one is better and safer?

Yeah that sucks… unless it’s over the top export controls for DoD work that really doesn’t make sense

I have seen a lot of companies start with this, then when they hit 150 users on their team plan and start having to pay API rates they immediately start introducing other models.

That's a bit obvious, isn't it?

Peak Hours: 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC

For European and US customers this is effectively 2x increase. I think i wll keep using both Flash and Pro as before.

EDIT: Misread numbers to believe off-peak kept old prices

~200% increase is marginal to you?

200% increase over practically free is still practically free

It mostly hurts people in countries with weak purchasing power. DS was the main game in down for them.

Personally, I don't think we've seen the total end of dirt cheap LLMs, it's just a frontier lab doesn't want to be in business of serving half the world.

It seems frontier labs want to sell Ferraris at Ferrari prices, when the mass market is for Hondas.

You certainly don't need Fable to code up a basic web app, any more than you need a Ferrari to go grocery shopping.

There's a lot more competition over smaller models. Ferraris are frontier labs' main differentiating point when Hondas are increasingly open source and commoditized.

Thank you for bringing that up, such a rarity for this place to remember the other 80% of the world.

As someone from just such a country, DeepSeek 0731 was the first time I seriously started using an LLM for coding. All previous attempts were useless or ridiculously expensive.

Can't say the old prices felt "free", but it was affordable if you're careful with your cache hit rate.

The new pricing probably pushed it into the unaffordable territory for tasks where you can do without it. Probably will try opencode go if they don't also follow suite, or will have to go back to wetware.

you should be using opencode go - you get 6x the tokens for the same price. They also have free models. Kilocode and others also offer free models.

opencode go is slowly losing its value. Most of the $60 for $10 have become $15 for $10. In addition to deepseek's api pricing going up 2x today.

That's not the way math works...

its precisely the way math works...

For the price of can of Coke, you can do a week of work. For most, that is not a bottleneck.

The whole point of turning intelligence into a commodity is to drive its price down, not up

They are hoarding HW at massive scale, they make it harder and more expensive to own

Just because you are fine with the new price doesn't mean it's not a problem

Perhaps it's time to pop this bubble

Makes sense - many US customers will probably be going to US providers once they release the weights.

They did release the weights and there are many providers https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...

Deepseek's official API has a pretty bad privacy policy so I would assume businesses avoid them in any event

it says they actively train on your data

Yes - unusually (uniquely?) bad for an official API.

Which is a real bummer because it’s otherwise solid with excellent caching.

My feelings are kind of split about it. On one hand, yes, I don't like it when a company essentially go through my history, train with it, and try to earn more profits for themselves based on what I've "unwillingly contributed". But then on the other hand, I also know that DeepSeek will release the weights they train (and publish new architecture upgrades) so me and others can download them and run them ourselves, as well as they'll earn more profits based on it. Then it's no longer so black and white for me, and I kind of feel like I'm not so bothered by it as when Anthropic and others do it.

I'd still prefer it wasn't like that, but I guess it's a compromise ultimately, at least I'll be able to run it myself.

I've had the same thoughts, and I think you articulated them pretty well; maybe better than I could have. I.e., for me it's something like: I'm much more willing to share if I know the party I share with will share back, in turn.

I know it's more complicated than that, with economics and privacy factors involved. But if I operate on the assumption that real privacy is real hard I'd rather just be guarded and careful with my prompts and whatever output I give to the LLM and expect that it will be training on that, rather than spill all my darkest secrets to some other LLM provider that pinkie-promises privacy only to leak it publicly later, anyway.

we should get discounts for that!

Not only that, the policy is so broad you effectively give up EVERYTHING. They're within their rights to just straight up post your raw conversation history to a public dataset on github/huggingface/modelscope or even host an atproto feed giving the world real-time access to your conversations.

Not saying they are or will, but their privacy policy is so permissive.

Yes, I assume US customers are more likely hobbyists, but in any case this off-peak designation can only mean that most of their business is domestic.

Interestingly it seems that Chinese customers are even more privacy-concerned than US ones, which is why the majority of Ziphu's (GLM) business is support services to Chinese companies running their open-weight models on-prem!

DeepSeek still has the best prices on offer directly. I wouldn't go with a US provider unless latency or privacy was an issue.

It wins on two fronts if this is true. Provides the cheap alternative for the West, and maximizes returns against their homegrown audience.

Yeah I saw complaints about this under their twitter announcement, that they're giving discounts to the rich foreign customers and screwing their own people.

That's one way of interpreting supply and demand curves, I guess :/

Not just domestic. They come from other Asian countries as well. Asia is huge with billions of people and their time zones are not so much different from each other.

Makes sense. 60% of the world's population is in Asia and software professionals in Asia are much more likely to prioritize affordable models like DeepSeek over expensive Western ones

Not sure they even have a choice.

Yep they don’t have a choice

That is not at all the case. The Chinese government is even indirectly subsidizing Claude and other platforms like ChatGPT.

If you buy Claude api access through a third party Chinese company, it's cheaper than when you buy directly.

Beside it would go against the Chinese philosophy of just using the right tool for the job. If Claude is better at a task than deepseek, they sure use Claude.

No really I don't get your claim, do you have any proof that you can source ??

Asia isn't just China. India has a larger population than China.

Anthropic doesn't allow Claude in China and neither does OpenAI. But the rest of Asia certainly has a choice. Unless you mean socioeconomically. Also there's plenty of loopholes people in China can use to still access those models

This is actually not that great for me on the eastern US since I'm a night owl and do all of my best work during the second peak segment. But I was worried the pricing was going to be much higher than it is. Looks like its still generally cheaper than the other chinese models.

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

[2] https://nitter.net/thdxr/status/2087610161636471289#m

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.

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

Plenty of chips in them thar datacentars

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?

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.

# 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

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

Already outdated though I think, as GLM 5.3 is latest now :)

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

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.

Friendship ended with DeepSeek. Starting from Sunday gpt 5.6 luna is my best friend

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 :-/

> EDIT: formatting

Keep at it, I believe in you.

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.

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          -

Seems to still be cheaper at worst case scenario on a pay as you schedule. The price increase isn't ideal, but still seems like a good deal to me.

Yeah, seems the same for me! Except the subscription plans you can get like Kimi K3 or GLM Coding Plan are still giving you more value if you need that many tokens (and can use those plans).

There are many nuances like amount of cache hit, the time of the day you use it and how other providers or even competitors respond, so it is hard to say concretely, but it might change my monthly usage close to one of the $20 USD plans.

I’m curious about how openrouter and Luna prices will change in response.

Forgive my naivety... What are the units? $1.4000 for how many input tokens?

Everything is per 1 million tokens.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

The Luna price dropped the day before a massive update to Flash (0731 update). GP may be referring to that version.

yes I use both, but tend to prefer DS-Flash

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#provid...

You don't mention the off-peak pricing which is half that. Most western workplaces will enjoy the cheaper prices.

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.

Sometimes there are disadvantages to sharing a timezone with China...

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.)

On the contrary; it seems Luna (max) is 2x as capable at 1/5 the cost: https://cognition.com/frontiercode

I don’t trust this bench. I move between opus and ds v4 pro and find them both significantly better then Gemini 3.7

The bench is not a black box, if you scroll down it gives an example of what the test cases look for

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.

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.

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)

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.

Few b2b buyers prefer it, for the same reason. For example, this is why reserved AWS instances exist.

I've always been curious about who works on software pricing. Do you guys hire actuaries for this type of work?

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.

Microeconomists. It's just a question of demand modeling. If you want to learn here is the bible: https://www.sup.org/books/business/pricing-and-revenue-optim...

It’s about quantifying the business value of the software to a specific customer segment.

More on my approach here: Https://forstarters.substack.com

Isn't it because they have customers who will use as many tokens as they can? With a flat rate, they will run Gas Town continuously while paying as much as the occasional user.

Yeah it feels like a very different model. I don’t try to fill up Apple/Google cloud drives to 1TB because then I’d have to clean up when I need space. I don’t bother trying to maximize my Audible subscription because there’s only so much I can listen to in a day. Even with my other AI subs that have monthly credits that don’t carry over, I just don’t have the interest or time to burn the credits.

But my Claude Max subscription? If I have any of my limit left the day of my reset, I’ll go and fire off research workflows with a bunch of parallel agents to explore whatever dumb ideas I had the past week. And there’s a 50:50 chance I’ll forget about it and never read the output.

And there's the rub. Firing off the task produces the dopamine hit, signaling you're doing something, but if you never read the output...are you really doing anything at all?

I don’t know, I get dopamine hits from sharpening my handplanes and using my Veritas routers on some scrap, but I just can’t empathize with getting a dopamine hit from using a bot. Especially with how bad Opus 5 has been.

I am however going to fire off a half assed prompt when the marginal cost is zero, even if I don’t use it (which is par for the course, I probably throw out two thirds of anything the AI writes anyway be it code or prose).

> Gas Town

Any experience with it?

> becomes a commodity/race to the bottom.

that's a good outcome - it means they're fungible, and easily available.

Somehow I keep hearing the rumblings of crypto maximalists trying to merge tokens. I actually wouldn’t mind since I signed up directly with some providers I’ve stopped using and have small amounts of credits strewn across the web.

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.

That’s what my KimiClaw has literally been doing

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

It’s very easy for the average person to mistake linguistic ability and simulated problem solving for intelligence and sentience.

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

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”?

I think you, and apparently many others, are hiding behind mathematical strictures to avoid the discussion. Your argument is actually "what requires an objective truth" Or else you could admit there's no real difference between zapping amino acids with electricity and zapping silicon with electricity.

Why are AIs mathematical beings with no possibility of consciousness whereas humans fall outside this and have the capability of consciousness?

I would make one further argument: as the top-of-the-food-chain species which originated the concept of consciousness, we get to define it however we want.

Consciousness is defined in the human context. We can just say “hey buddy that’s not biological enough to qualify.”

We'll have Dwarkesh's "datacenter full of geniuses" with 99% of the geniuses coding up CRUD apps, then the dusty GPU in the corner, with the "do not disturb" sign on it, pipes up "You're absolutely right! The answer is 42!".

It's worth keeping in mind the model doesn't keep a running memory. Each time its instantiated, it begins from its release state - so from its perspective (if it had one) the current task would be the first stop after posttraining. Perhaps the only stop.

Though of course you're talking about data centers, and romanticizing them rather than the AI itself.

No, llm providers will start providing a service that looks a lot like rumination or (day)dreaming. Like thats the prompt "you're daydreaming about this work you recently did" then add in whatever is in the current session.

Why do they do it this way? Because dogfooding is harmful to the model? Is this implying there's no benefit in having the model train on itself?

> Is this implying there's no benefit in having the model train on itself?

There are various theories around model collapse when you train on too much AI generated data (that's not for distillation).

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)

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

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.

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?

> 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).

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.

> if OpenRouter is blindly dispatching your requests

This can somewhat be the case, depending on your config. I updated mine to make DeepSeek high priority because I was having a lot of cache misses and reliability issues with the default (cheapest (at face value)) providers, and cost was actually higher overall than anticipated. Was smooth sailing from then; might have to tweak things again now pricing has changed though.

I was having the same issue. Did not find any provider that had a cache hit rate anywhere close to DeepSeeks own API.

Not sure if this was an OpenRouter issue or with the other inference providers.

You could also check out token.dance. They offer DeepSeek and other models through an OpenAI-compatible API, and the pricing seems pretty competitive. Might be worth comparing the cache rates.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

Tibo said it’s permanent, whatever that means

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

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.

Luna is multimodal.

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.

Luna has one vendor and they can change the price any time. Deepseek is open and has dozens of vendors competing to serve it.

Can you help me find a few names? These are inference providers running open weights models, right?

Thank you in advance!

Look at OpenRouter. They have lots of providers

You might want to check out token.dance. It offers multiple AI models through one OpenAI-compatible API, with very competitive pricing.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

This actually works out favorably for US customers since the peak hours are Chinese working hours and cheap hours are US working hours.

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.

Are we gonna see "we work those unusual hours because that's when LLMs are cheap"?

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.

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?

off of one historical price change, no.

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.

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...

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-byted...

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.

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.

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.

Have you considered spending less in candles?

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.

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.

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.

I wonder if this is enough to push people back onto Luna with their comparative price drop

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)?

Now Baseten's pricing is cheaper than the official one? Probably won't last, but still interesting.

https://www.baseten.co/pricing/

If anyone has tried Baseten versions of these Chinese frontier models, let me know what you found.

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

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

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.

Now if there could be a bot that defers queries until when it’s cheap…

Wouldn't be hard to whip up...

The whipping's the easy part. It's the plating and serving that takes time

"half-priced batch API" kind of thing has been around for a long time.

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)

I wonder whether all the DeepSeek providers will follow suit or are they going to try to stay competitive with the old prices?

I didn't get the impression that anyone competed with the old prices before.

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

- 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)

Yeah, None of them offers the same cache hit prices and my cache hits are >95%.

DeepSeek’s cache pricing was always 1/10th the competition.

It’s still cheaper than everybody else.

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

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