# AI Pricing This Week: DeepSeek Gets Cheaper, Claude Sonnet 5 Gets Pricier > Source: > Published: 2026-08-03 05:07:13+00:00 Two pricing stories dropped this week that are worth a pause if you're building on LLM APIs. DeepSeek V4 Flash left preview at **$0.14 / $0.28 per million tokens** (input/output) — and it's beating its own larger Pro model on agentic benchmarks, hitting **82.7% on Terminal-Bench**. That's a smaller, cheaper model outperforming its own bigger sibling on agent tasks. Anthropic's introductory pricing for Claude Sonnet 5 ends September 1. The headline price rises from **$2 to $3 per million tokens** — but the bigger change is under the hood: a new tokenizer adds **up to 35% more tokens** for the same text. Combine the two and the real-world cost increase is closer to **2x**, not 1.5x. If your stack leans on frontier models by default, this is a good week to: Cheap isn't always what it looks like on the label, and expensive doesn't always show up as a sticker price change — sometimes it's a tokenizer. *Sources: llm-stats.com, aitoolsrecap.com*