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DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

api-docs.deepseek.com

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Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#151
post #21
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It is in the model's provider's interest for you to believe this because they get to lock you into their harness and inference. As models get better they will get better at using any harness, it comes down to how well the harness is actually engineered. I highly recommend you take an hour or two and check out Pi to either solidify or change your assumption. The harness is essentially just another developer tool and can be as opinionated, overly-engineered, minimal as anything else. I would think for DeepSeek, especially, they're efforts are much better spent researching how to make their LLM's better instead of working on engineering a harness that might get some marginal gain building it for their models.

Edit: here is a really good twitter thread about this exact topic: https://xcancel.com/kunchenguid/status/2057700714626105412

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#152
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh damn, I haven't noticed because my browser removes the referer header. But I think the image on the block page is a pretty good answer to why he did that.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Chinese EV makers have a few interesting technologies especially wrt. batteries but they're still very far from catching up to the frontier in a general sense. From that narrow POV Musk was absolutely correct.

EV =/= software-defined vehicle, and Chinese EVs are doing well in both areas

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both pi, opencode and zed work amazing with deepseek.

You seem to have tried a few things, if you don't mind I have a few questions as someone currently on Claude Code but would prefer to not lock myself in a commercial ecosystem (and their pricing change regarding headless usage is annoying me): - how do/would you add the WebSearch tool to your harness? pay for a separate service or does deepseek offer something with their subscriptions? - do pi/opencode support pastin…

Brave, Exa, and Tavily all offer a free tier for websearch, after that it comes out to like 1¢/search, very easy to ask pi to build a web search tool using any of these providers.

They support image locations like a file or url, but not regular images (opencode desktop might though?)

Both pi and opencode make it very easy to change models so you can easily call to 5.4-mini or whichever multi-modal LLM for reading images. I'm sure you could even create a skill to automate the process too, having the model use the cli to send the photo to the multi-modal and give it back a description.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#155
post #102
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is still more expensive per-request than the common Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions, but the math changes a lot based on your specific use case. https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/...

But as usual, there are far cheaper subscriptions with higher limits than Anthropic and OpenAI, that also provide DeepSeek v4 Pro. So you should use those subscriptions first until you max them out, then look at a different subscription.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#157
post #146

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 t…

Flash on it's own is not a very competitive model, it's pricing is within ranges of everything else on the market. Probably the most direct competitor of Flash model : GPT 5.4 mini Cache Read $0.075 /M tokens Gemini 3 flash : Cache Read $0.05 /M tokens e.g nothing very magical or ground breaking.

Cache read for dp4-flash is $0.0028 /M tokens, which is more than 10 times cheaper (and also much cheaper for cache miss and output tokens).

Have not actually compared it to other models, but I would not consider it in the same price range.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#158
post #98
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 switched to predomentantly using mimo this week, mostly out of curiosity to see how dependant I was on frontier models. Honestly I cant really tell the difference. I would say I work on pretty average codebases with well know frameworks doing pretty typical things and initial impressions is that mimo, kimi and deepseek can probably handle what I need more or less the same as gpt5.5 or claude.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#160
I will testify I have used V4 Pro as a coding agent and it did a great job solving a complex problem. It worked with Pi over something like an hour, iterating and running tests. I paid API rates via OpenRouter and it cost me less than $1 I think. I've had single prompts cost that much with Anthropic. I was very impressed.
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