DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

(api-docs.deepseek.com)

92 points | by Tiberium 2 hours ago

16 comments

  • alyxya 50 minutes ago
    Once they have their own coding agent which they seem to be working towards, I may start predominantly using their models. They seem to be doing all the "right" things, open sourcing models, publishing research, and keeping prices low for everyone.
    • ammar_x 15 minutes ago
      You can use V4 Pro with Claude Code [1].

      I tried it and it's impressive.

      [1]: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...

      • Scarbutt 4 minutes ago
        Surprised Anthropic hasn't done anything to restrict Claude Code from using other providers.
    • lambda 49 minutes ago
      Why do you need them to provide a coding agent? Just use their model with any off the shelf coding agent. I happen to prefer Pi, but use whatever works for you.
      • alyxya 25 minutes ago
        I probably have an unfounded assumption that whatever coding agent they make will work really well with their models, better than external harnesses. I don't have a good sense for how all the model + harness combinations compare, nor any good way to compare them myself, but generally believe model companies train their models to work best with their own harness.
      • hootz 44 minutes ago
        Yeah, I'm using Pi with their models through an OpenCode Go subscription and it works pretty well. 10 bucks and V4-Flash is virtually infinite.
    • zozbot234 4 minutes ago
      antirez's ds4-agent works quite fine. It runs on any Apple Silicon device with 96GB RAM or more.
    • tequila_shot 16 minutes ago
      You no longer need "their coding agent". You can hook up claude code to use Deepseek. Works perfectly.
    • cultofmetatron 15 minutes ago
      open code works with them today. I've been using it fulltime for 2 weeks so far.
  • wg0 44 minutes ago
    If you have not tried DeepdeekV4 you're missing out. The pricing makes it unbelievably good.

    The chains of thought for Deepseek are very very interesting reads. Open code won't show them but do read them and you'll be surprised at how underrated the model is.

    My model usage is very low but I still do pay directly to Deepseek regularly as my tribute and contribution to them open sourcing their models as my gratitude and showing support for what I deem positive for overall social good.

    • tequila_shot 15 minutes ago
      Yes - the model is REALLY good. I try Claude at work and Deepseek personally and this is the only model that works without trying to actively bankcrypt me.
      • seemaze 5 minutes ago
        Perhaps unintentional, but I find 'bankrypt' to be a thoroughly interesting portmonteau.

        I'm not sure if it's when you run out of crypto, or when your bank gets hit by ransomeware.

  • Sphax 1 hour ago
    That is some insane value. I've been using GLM Coding Plan Max with GLM 5.1 for a while and i've tested DeepSeek V4 Pro maybe for 3 weeks now and I found it to be better than GLM 5.1 for complex coding tasks. I've used 65m tokens and with that price it cost me $1.5, that's really cheap.
    • DeathArrow 5 minutes ago
      I think Deepseek uses much more tokens than other models.
  • margorczynski 28 minutes ago
    Maybe the Chinese are playing the long game by trying to bankrupt the US competition? Because there's no way this is financially viable.
    • zozbot234 1 minute ago
      US suppliers are fine and won't go bankrupt, they can just focus on serving bigger "Pro" class models. In fact cheap AI makes the bigger and smarter models more useful because it's smart enough to draft a clear question to the model, which helps minimize wasted tokens.
    • ecommerceguy 21 minutes ago
      Small team, cheap electricity, very efficient models. Many western companies operate at a loss to gain market share. Why can't the Chinese?
    • odie5533 12 minutes ago
      Inference is cheap. I bet the financials of these Chinese companies are much saner looking than any of the big US AI companies which are bloated by investors.
    • tencentshill 18 minutes ago
      Federal ban incoming then. They did it with cars already.
  • doctoboggan 12 minutes ago
    I am more worried about accidental data leak (agent reading env file for example) with the Chinese hosted models compared to the US hosted models. Am I wrong to suspect that the Chinese government might be more likely to scan all chats and save useful information compared to the US government or company?

    I hesitated to even post this comment as it sounds biased and xenophobic. I would love for someone to convince me I am wrong. Does anyone have any insight into the company behind deepseek hosting, and what their history of respecting data privacy is?

    • giwook 5 minutes ago
      I think there is a nonzero chance of that happening. Beijing could at any point decide that DeepSeek has become too powerful and/or is a major export and start to insert themselves (assuming they have not already).

      There are widespread reports about how foreign actors (not limited to China) have infiltrated critical networks across many industries in the US en masse and are simply waiting for the right time to exploit them. Frontier models are simply another attack vector (and much more easily exploitable when you think about it).

      The fact is that there is potential for this with any cloud-hosted model, whether it is intentional by the actual company building the models or a malicious actor is able to exploit a vulnerability.

    • nivekney 9 minutes ago
      User data integrity definitely should be a concern. It's also known that regulations is being outpaced, so the cost of being/using frontier products is a double-edged sword for sure.
  • cold_harbor 1 hour ago
    their MLA architecture cuts KV cache by ~5-13x vs standard attention. that's why inference is actually cheaper to run, not just a price war to gain market share.
    • zozbot234 42 minutes ago
      That's also a game changer for local inference. It unlocks long contexts, batched inference and storing the KV cache to disk on ordinary consumer platforms.
    • hmaddipatla 10 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • velomash 11 minutes ago
    I found that DSV4 wasn't as cheap as its token price. It burns tokens at a pretty high rate
  • Reubend 52 minutes ago
    Props to them. That makes DeepSeek v4 Pro extremely cheap compared to others, even in the same category. Look at these prices per million outputs tokens:

    DeepSeek V4 Pro: $0.87

    Qwen 3.7 Max: $7.50

    Grok 4.3: $2.50

    GLM 1.5: $3.08

    Opus 4.7: $25.00

    GPT-5.5: $30.00

    • Arcuru 41 minutes ago
      It's actually even cheaper when you look at the cache read costs. Those costs can dominate in agent workflows and DeepSeek's cost for cache reads is insanely low comparatively. At $.003626/M tokens, the cheapest other thing on your list is >$.2/M tokens. That's on the scale of 100x cheaper.
  • bel8 1 hour ago
    Great! I have been using DeepSeek 4 Flash high for everything lately.

    First accessible model with useable 1 million context window for me.

  • sourcecodeplz 17 minutes ago
    Honestly I haven't even tried the Pro model. Flash was just so much more than I expected I just keep working with it. Thank you deepseek team
  • belinder 1 hour ago
    Anyone using deepseek through a gateway (not sure if right term) so there's no data retention? At work we're going through a few hundred million tokens a day in our app (using anthropic models), and we're looking for something significantly cheaper
    • mlcruz 40 minutes ago
      I have been using deepseek via deepinfra, afaik they provide no data retention. Im probably going to deploy the full model on their infra instead of paying credits at some point, so far the experience has been pretty good
      • goobatrooba 9 minutes ago
        But do these prices apply if you use a third party go-between? I would expect they then charge their own prices?
    • bel8 1 hour ago
      opencode allegedly has contractual no-data-retention policies with their providers.

      I recall reading about that in an issue or in their Discord server.

      But I would contact them formally to verify that.

  • Havoc 1 hour ago
    Neat. I like DS for secondary checks on code. Sometimes spots things other models don't
  • guelo 21 minutes ago
    Even at these prices I find claude and codex subscriptions to be cheaper than per-token pricing when my usage is hovering around the session limits. I guess the subscriptions are heavily subsidized.
  • kingjimmy 1 hour ago
    is this the Huawei chip difference?