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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

#191
post #113
post #23

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.

I guess I got downvoted because people don't believe me that it's cheaper? But I spent $5 a couple days ago in one hour with deepseek v4 in a coding agent. That's way more expensive than a $20/month claude subscription. Even if I hit claude's 5h limit in one hour I can do that many times in a month.

you doing probably something wrong, I used Deepseek v4 pro with opencode and in a day used 100M tokens for ~$2. Majority of tokens are cache tokens and those are extremely cheap in deepseek bordering free.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see no evidence anywhere that "inference is cheap". To my knowledge this is a myth being spread to pretend ChatGPT or Claude will one day make any economic sense. DeepSeek likely operates at a loss. How big the loss is anyone's guess. Meanwhile I am happy using their model. It is really good, to a point I forget I am not using Codex or Claude.

[deleted]

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DeepSeek is very likely selling tokens at a loss. There're many cloud providers that provide you with DeepSeek V4 Pro via API, and those services at least twice as expensive as DeepSeek itself.

^Sorry for this understatement. DeepSeek is actually selling tokens at a far cheaper price than my previous comment implied.

DeepSeek V4 Pro price on OpenRouter:

deepseek: $0.435 / $0.87

baidu/fp8: $1.521 / $3.042

novita/fp8: $1.64 / $3.38

Yup. DeepSeek either has next-generation hardware that somehow no one else has access to, or they're selling at a loss.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#194

This looks suspiciously cheap. The same model hosted by other providers is much more expensive [0]. So either DeepSeek can host it much cheaper than anyone else, or their business model is different. I suspect the latter, especially since their privacy policy [1] says personal data, including “User Input,” can be used "To improve and develop the Services and to train and improve our technology" . [0]: https://openrou…

They're selling at a loss (obviously).

But why not? Gaining market share at a loss isn't the US's patent.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#195
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.

I would prefer a coding agent to be somewhat independent of the model provider. Providers are trading off on quality, features, and price so frequently, and I don't want to keep changing my agent every time.

I am looking forward to things slowing down and stabilizing. I'm not saying that should happen today, just I am looking forward to it.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#196
post #27
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...

It seems you can use the Claude Code CLI harness without a Claude Pro subscription now, which I don't think you could a before?

I've been using Deepseek v4 with Cline in VS Code as a replacement for Github Copilot, and it's not been too bad.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#197
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 just did a little comparison using benchmarks for GPT 5.1 through 5.4 to map out the equivalent capability-level of some of the Chinese models.

Based on these benchmarks, here's a rough mapping:

- Qwen 3.7 ~= GPT 5.3

- Kimi K2.6 ~= GPT 5.15

- DS V4 ~= GPT 5.1

So yes, we have GPT 5 at home now. No need to pay the Legacy Labs anymore.

Here's the benchmark I used since I can't post images here: https://x.com/trydotworks/status/2058004995195490706?s=20

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the image trying to convey? Genuine question, I just come here to read nerd stuff and I'm not aware of any controversy

The image shows Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator. He has lately been on a huge AI psychosis streak, bragging about things like "shipping 37000 lines of code every day" and "using Claude Code so much it burned out his USB-C power connectors". He's in a lobster suit because he's talking about OpenClaw, an AI agent assistant which those same AI psychosis types lean into too much by giving it full read-write access to all their life and then getting surprised when it accidentally deletes all of their emails.

Pi's developer is obviously not anti-AI, and he definitely doesn't hate OpenClaw, since it's based on Pi. But there's a growing number of people who take those things too far, and a lot of them are on HN. You can easily find them in the comments of any AI-related post here. I assume that's the type of people the image is portraying.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#199

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

They might be thinking, we already have the servers and the GPUs sitting there anyway so why not make full use of it? They're not even close to being at a mature state where they start to monetize.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#200
post #195
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.

I would prefer a coding agent to be somewhat independent of the model provider. Providers are trading off on quality, features, and price so frequently, and I don't want to keep changing my agent every time. I am looking forward to things slowing down and stabilizing. I'm not saying that should happen today, just I am looking forward to it.

I think this will happen much sooner than we thought. Maybe it will happen in next 6 months
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