Didn't DeepSeek go up 2x?
All of this DeepSeek price increase stuff is related to their specific API, not the entire market.
They were stealing your code for that extremely cheap cached token price.
That was never the real price. Every Chinese LLM API provider is the same to the best of my knowledge.
"CHEAP API" (but pssst we train on every single input aka your code and ideas are ours forever)
If some models are cheaper it's simply because they cost far less to develop. And/or run.