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

211–220 of 586 posts

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#211

Post by r0b05 »

c0rruptbytes wrote: post #107
smoe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What hardware and quant do you run it with?

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#212

Post by jeffadelic »

seemaze wrote: post #36
tequila_shot wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Ironically you spelled portmanteau incorrectly. OP very well could have made a similar error for bankrupt. Maybe not, interesting to think about.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#213

Post by aqfamnzc »

jeffadelic wrote: post #212
seemaze wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ironically you spelled portmanteau incorrectly. OP very well could have made a similar error for bankrupt. Maybe not, interesting to think about.

I'll be honest, I carefully scanned your comment for a similar mispelling.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#215

Post by [deleted] »

wg0 wrote: post #13

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 a…

[deleted]

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#216

Post by freakynit »

raincole wrote: post #207
missedthecue wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't raised enough money to be selling at a loss. And selling at a loss to gain market share in an industry with zero switching friction between sellers is not a strategy. That doesn't make sense. Loss leading only works when - it leads to a situation that allows you to prevent competitors from selling to your customers (gilded age railroad and pipeline industries are great examples). Then you can eventually…

Yeah, cool theory, but they are selling at a loss. We know that because their model is open and available on other providers too. No other provider even sells a quantitized version of DeepSeek V4 Pro at that price. Also, in case of LLM, market share = more people uploading their whole codebase/legal documents/unfinished books/literally everything to your servers for you to use in future training. So the incentive to…

We are missing the fact that they have created their GPU's that are now just 4-5 years behind. And considering it's China, which does everything-hardware at insane scale, and efficiency, my guess is that they are at step-1 now... gain market share at loss, and at the same time, gradually, start plugging their in-house cards to power these models to gauge their performance on real workloads.

Once they cross a certain threshold, nVidia can say goodbye to it's monopolisitic profit margins of over 70%.

GPU infra capex is the biggest spend for the inference providers as of now, power, second biggest.

China has already cracked the power part, they are now close to cracking the GPU part.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#217

Post by freakynit »

Arcuru wrote: post #16
Reubend wrote: post #10

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

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.

Also, deepseek cache hit rates are pretty good. I use deepseek v4 flash model regularly for agentic tasks (more than 20 tool calls on average per run), and 70%+ of input tokens get served from cache.

The speed is absolutely bonkers too. I once misconfigured a mcp I was developing locally, and told it to use the tools provided by this mcp to get certain task done. It figured out that the mcp is misconfigured, and then automatically went ahead and started to fix the mcp, fixed it, and then started using it by passing raw jsonrpc messages using stdin/out, bypassing the harness integration (since it would have needed a restart).

It did all of this in under 30 seconds and made over 15 tool calls in all of this (yes, I use yolo mode in a container, so my agents have full access to everything in the container).

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#218

Post by vrganj »

eiek wrote: post #69
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #55

I just canceled Claude Code and Codex today. RIP. Claude literally refuses to finish tasks in auto mode and just keeps saying, now is a good stopping point, when it's 1% done (and doing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I tell it). Codex is barely better... May as well pay 1/20th the price for DeepSeek. Claude seems to have something that looks at how long you've been a customer and then just massively degrades quality. Whe…

They’re playing games behind the scenes to massage and manage their earnings. China is gonna win long term there’s no doubt. The fact that the American firms haven’t created immense escape velocity despite the disparity in spending is quite telling.

Let's hope so.

If the Chinese model of open weights wins, AI will benefit everyone.

If the American model of closed weights wins, AI will benefit a few rich guys and everyone else will be thrown into precarity.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#219

Post by vrganj »

zozbot234 wrote: post #40
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.

antirez's ds4-agent works quite fine. It runs on any Apple Silicon device with 96GB RAM or more.

Anything that runs with 64?

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#220

Post by iammrpayments »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #155
rjh29 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

I don’t even use Claude that much and was hitting limits in the 20$ using sonnet, I’ve deposited 5$ with deepseek and haven’t hit the limit after spending 60million+ tokens. So no way it’s more expensive.
Post reply on HN