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DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent (api-docs.deepseek.com)

621 points by Tiberium ↗ HN
> (3) The deepseek-v4-pro model API pricing will be officially adjusted to 1/4 of the original price after the 75% discount promotion ends on 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC.

https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2057854261699195173

Related ongoing thread:

DeepSeek reasonix, DeepSeek native coding agent with high caching and low cost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256953 - May 2026 (135 comments)

125 comments

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Havoc
Neat. I like DS for secondary checks on code. Sometimes spots things other models don't
Sphax
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.
bel8
Great! I have been using DeepSeek 4 Flash high for everything lately.

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

kingjimmy
is this the Huawei chip difference?
belinder
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
cold_harbor
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.
Reubend
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

gck1
The next time someone says "stop crying about usage limits, they're losing money on your subscription ", I'm going to link to this comment.

Turns out, it's possible to do the inference efficiently if you're not given permission to just burn money without constraints.

alyxya
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.
ReptileMan
Both pi, opencode and zed work amazing with deepseek.
smoe
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 strong statement, but my first impression is that, in practice, all those models may be less behind on typical daily tasks than people think.

They are a bit “work hard, not smart". Getting to same-ish results more slowly and using more tokens, but at a fraction of the price

potsandpans
Give pi a try if you haven't already. Avoid vendor harness lock-in.
minimaxir
Zed's Agent natively supports a DeepSeek API key now. (do not use it through OpenRouter if you want to save the most cost)
jack_pp
i have done some amazing things for 5 dollars, using opencode. give it a shot, it is incredibly cheap
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vinhnx
You can use DeepSeek with my coding agent VT Code. Recently I've added DeepSeek V4 Pro and DeepSeek V4 Flash support with all providers, via: Official DeepSeek API, HuggingFace, Ollama Cloud, OpenRouter providers.

> https://github.com/vinhnx/vtcode

jdboyd
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.

linzhangrun
there already is a open-sourced deepseek-tui coding agent. besides, you can always connect to opencode.
teekert
Why not OpenCode? Genuine question, not an expert..
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azinman2
And not letting you opt out of being their training data.
wg0
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.

cassianoleal
I live V4 Pro for certain things but I've been quite impressed with V4 Flash for coding. It's terse, to the point, tends to make few mistakes and is pretty fast.
inhumantsar
same here. gpt-5.x medium was my default for coding and v4 flash (max) has completely replaced it. it's the first open source model that made me feel like I could just let rip and not worry any more than Claude or GPT.

When planning small-to-medium sized changes, I found that it was a little bit faster than GPT-5.5 (high) and produced equivalent results. on large changes its results were fine but GPT's were more thoroughly thought through. DS v4 beats the absolute pants off GPT when it comes tone and style though.

intuxikated
Reasoning display can be toggled in opencode
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schmorptron
i see the reasoning traces in opencode (cli). maybe it's a setting?
CryptoBanker
Opencode absolutely will show you. You just have to toggle “Expand Reasoning”
solarkraft
OpenCode does show them when you select so in the settings - at least I’ve been getting very long traces so I’d be surprised to learn they are summaries.
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margorczynski
Maybe the Chinese are playing the long game by trying to bankrupt the US competition? Because there's no way this is financially viable.
dyauspitr
For sure. But also they’re building an electrostate with 100% electricity redundancy and dirt cheap electricity. They might actually be able to sustain this.
try-working
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.
guelo
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.
guelo
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.
sourcecodeplz
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
doctoboggan
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?

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lejalv
I really like the part where Trump has been prevented from pardoning violent rioters that caused deaths in an attempted coup d'état. Super impressive, great democracy.
throawayonthe
> In fact there isn't even a concept of "keeping the government in check"

> Xi Jinping has never been over ruled because that isn't even a thing that can happen there.

this is what the median american voter believes lol

megous
Wake me up when US presidents start going to prison for killing hundreds of innocents, or starting wars of aggression, or supporting appartheid regimes, or genocides, or insider trading, or targetted economic destabilization of other countries, or stealing, or persecution, or any number of other things normies would go to prison for.

US presidents are prevented from nothing, when it comes to what they do to non-americans. And you're telling me, they'd stop at not reading my claude convos? That's where the red lines is? Lol.

lejalv
Yes, you are wrong, and yes it is xenophobic, and no it won't stop because you are too afraid to fall from your Hollywood-induced exceptionalism.

Where were you when ... everything happened? Keywords: Snowden, five eyes, FISA, PRISM, ...

Laws in the US are irrelevant. And Google has much more sensitive data to cross with any inputs you give them than Chinese companies. Also the extraterritorial executions, coups, etc. are the US specialty. So yes, you're wrong, and it comes across as xenophobic (fear of the strange or foreign).

throawayonthe
"Am I wrong to suspect that the Chinese government might be more likely ..." yes you are

the US is known to do dragnet surveillance; yes it's likely China might, but we don't know if it's valuable enough in this instance

anyway deepseek is open about using this data for training, therefore it is stored and could be searched if someone really wanted; so do the western providers (even when you opt out, at least on the non enterprise plans, most "store for up to thirty days for compliance or LE reasons" lol)

velomash
I found that DSV4 wasn't as cheap as its token price. It burns tokens at a pretty high rate
bel8
try high variant instead of max.

max is really chatty for minimal gain.

dburkland
I've had a ton of success when pairing Opus 4.7 for planning w/ DeepSeek V4 Flash in opencode. Best part is DeepSeek V4 Flash is Free through opencode Zen.
vladgur
Which models do folks use for openclaw nowadays
npilk
I've been using DeepSeek Flash to replace Sonnet once the subscription stopped working. Haven't really noticed a difference, although I don't usually have it doing anything very complicated.
onlyrealcuzzo
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.

When I started my subscription, Claude had none of these problems.

2 months into subscriptions Claude is completely unusable garbage, and Codex is not much better.

wolttam
I was hoping they were going to do this.

I'll keep running Flash locally for the stuff I care about data privacy, but the value of Pro through their API is unreal for anything else (and I want to give them my training data as long as they keep putting out open models).

gertlabs
Even with the V4 Pro discount, the V4 Flash model gives you the best performance per unit dollar, and better performance overall for agentic, tool-heavy workloads. V4 Pro is smarter in one-shot reasoning, but at a significant speed difference. The performance, cost, and speed, makes V4 Flash our top flash model today by far.

Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings

dyauspitr
In my use cases (mainly very large summarization and idea extraction) it’s pretty shit though compared to Pro.
louiereederson
I wonder if/when the US limits market entry of Deepseek and other Chinese model vendors like they have done with Huawei
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.