Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

api-docs.deepseek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 586 posts

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#101

Post by overfeed »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #52
margorczynski wrote: post #20

Maybe the Chinese are playing the long game by trying to bankrupt the US competition? Because there's no way this is financially viable.

If you think heavily subsidizing AI models isn’t financially viable, I have some bad news for you about US AI companies. Deepseek has made some incredible advancements in model efficiency, and more importantly actually publishes those advancements so everyone can benefit from them.

> more importantly actually publishes those advancements so everyone can benefit from them.

I suspect American inference providers implement the efficiency gains, and pad their margins rather than pass the savings along to the consumer.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#102

Post by rjh29 »

ammar_x wrote: post #27
alyxya wrote: post #11

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.

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...

How does the cost compare using the API vs the $20/month plans with other providers?

I did some back of the envelope calculations and it seems like you would pay $5/month using DeepSeek directly or $15-20 with OpenRouter or similar. But would be interested to hear real world usage.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#103

Post by rjh29 »

flexagoon wrote: post #88
wiradikusuma wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I thought Claude Code is not as good, therefore people want to use Claude model with other alternatives. This is the other way around. Which begs the question, regardless of the model, which Claude Code alternative is better? (I keep saying "Claude Code alternative" because I don't know the term... LLM CLI?)

AFAIK the two most popular open source harnesses right now are OpenCode and Pi. They take a pretty different approach, OpenCode includes a lot of features while Pi is very minimal by design and focused on extensibility, to the point where many people are just asking Pi to write a plugin for itself whenever they want it to have a new feature. I personally like Pi's philosophy more and I think its developer justified t…

Author blocks referrals from HN, weirdly dramatic, especially considering they have 1086 karma here. I wonder what we did to them.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#104

Post by potsandpans »

alyxya wrote: post #11

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.

Give pi a try if you haven't already. Avoid vendor harness lock-in.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#105

Post by trollbridge »

vitorsr wrote: post #84
cold_harbor wrote: post #8

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.

Yes. The discount was most likely a "post-market trial" of how efficient the caching works for the new generation models.

I've "adjusted" my workflows now to use the cache. (Basically read all the files in your project very early on in your session, etc., simple stuff like that.)

Nearly all requests are cached now. It's amazing.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#106

Post by overfeed »

zozbot234 wrote: post #41
margorczynski wrote: post #20

Maybe the Chinese are playing the long game by trying to bankrupt the US competition? Because there's no way this is financially viable.

US suppliers are fine and won't go bankrupt, they can just focus on serving bigger "Pro" class models from their large datacenters. 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.

> US suppliers are fine and won't go bankrupt, they can just focus on serving...

For a while, US automakers thought the same of Japanese, then Korean car manufacturers, and Musk laughed at Chinese EV makers in an interview >12 years ago. People learn and get better at making things until they catch up with the frontier.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#107

Post by c0rruptbytes »

smoe wrote: post #98
alyxya wrote: post #11

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.

Earlier this week I started testing Chinese models on my codebase. I haven’t really looked at interactive coding yet, but more at issue triage, bug auto-fixing, log analytics, etc. I used DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Qwen, and MiMO against GPT-5.5 high as reference, all running in Pi harness without anything installed. So far, Kimi and MiMO look the most promising to me. I haven’t tested them rigorously enough to make a stro…

I personally really like DS4 Flash - it's the largest I can run locally with decent speeds and I feel like it's good enough to maintain a codebase with less effort

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#108

Post by throwa356262 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #41
margorczynski wrote: post #20

Maybe the Chinese are playing the long game by trying to bankrupt the US competition? Because there's no way this is financially viable.

US suppliers are fine and won't go bankrupt, they can just focus on serving bigger "Pro" class models from their large datacenters. 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.

US providers are burning VC money because they have been selling the idea of total world domination. Even the government has bought into that. Now suddenly they are not longer dominating the field and even need uncle Sam to protect them from foreign competitors.

When VC pulls out, some of them may go bankrupt.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#109

Post by wolttam »

chandureddyvari wrote: post #75
wolttam wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of Claude Code the harness isn't that great. There's a lot of other good harnesses out there.

What’s your favourite harness? Is there any benchmarks for harness like LLMs have for swe verified?

You can check my profile for which one I like most :) I do think there have been efforts to benchmark different harnesses.

Personally I'm not going to choose one harness or another based on +/- a few percentage points in a benchmark. I'm going to use one the one that I find the most ergonomic, that isn't too bloated, etc. The models are the primary lever, not the harness.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#110

Post by minimaxir »

I'm more curious about the caching:

> (2) For all models, the input cache hit price has been reduced to 1/10 of the launch price. This price adjustment takes effect from 2026/4/26 12:15 UTC.

There is no end date. Currently, it's 2% of the input price for DeepSeek V4 Flash and 0.8% with this new V4 Pro pricing, which is extremely low compared to competitors to the point that it affects the unit economics a bit and I thought it would be temporary.

In the case of V4 Pro, the effective cost is ~$0.04/M input tokens given the caching (based on OpenRouter's metrics: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro), which is significantly cheaper than even small models from competitors.

Post reply on HN