Via livescience.com
The Chinese AI startup's rock-bottom pricing era appears to be over as surging demand forces a dramatic rate restructuring across its V4 model lineup.
DeepSeek, the Hangzhou-based AI company that rattled Silicon Valley with absurdly cheap language models, is about to get a lot less cheap. Starting August 16 at 16:00 UTC, the company will raise API prices across its V4-Flash and V4-Pro models by anywhere from 50% to more than 1,100%, depending on token type and time of day.
The increases come with a new peak and off-peak pricing structure. Using the API during busy hours will cost twice as much as using it during off-peak windows.
The numbers behind the sticker shock #
For the V4-Flash model, off-peak cache-hit input tokens will cost $0.007 per million, up from $0.0028. That’s a 150% increase. Cache-miss input tokens jump from $0.14 to $0.22 per million, a roughly 57% bump. Output tokens rise from $0.28 to $0.66 per million during off-peak hours. Peak rates double all of those off-peak figures. So output tokens during high-traffic windows will run $1.32 per million, nearly five times the previous flat rate of $0.28. The V4-Pro models follow a similar tiered structure with peak rates set at twice the off-peak level.
Why the change, and why now #
DeepSeek telegraphed this move roughly ten days earlier. On or around August 6, the company signaled that price adjustments were coming, pointing to heightened demand as the driving factor.
Founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek operates with a funding structure unusual for the AI arms race. The company is backed exclusively by High-Flyer, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund.
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