DeepSeek planning to significantly raise prices

Posted by miroljub 1 day ago

DeepSeek planning to significantly raise prices(platform.deepseek.com)

85 points | 70 commentspage 2

midnightbobarun 1 day ago|

DeepSeek was such a workhorse... I've had some pretty decent results with Hy3 and Nemotron too, but they're not the same. I'll probably have to switch to them (or find other alternatives) depending on how much DeepSeek raises prices.

GTP 1 day ago||

The link takes me to a login page.

timpera 1 day ago|

> We plan to raise the overall pricing for DeepSeek API services in the near future, with a significant increase expected. Please plan your usage accordingly. The specific pricing plan will be subject to official notice.

It would be nice to have this notice on the public documentation as well.

daemonologist 1 day ago||

It's here as well: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/

LoganDark 1 day ago||

I guess they invested in some new infra and want to make that back over the next 10 months [0]:

> For us, a reasonable profit means roughly this: we buy a batch of servers, and we recover the cost in about ten months. Given the risks and the upfront investment, even if we depreciate a server financially over three or five years, commercially we think a ten-month payback is enough. That is the logic behind our current API pricing. For V3.2 Flash and other models, the standard is the same: recover the cost of the equipment in ten months.

[0]: https://thechatr.ai/blog/deepseek-liang-wenfeng-investor-mee...

abdullahkhalids 1 day ago||

Is there currently a lot of difference between deepseek's own prices and other provider's prices of deepseek models?

AtlanticThird 1 day ago||

Looks like other providers are around 50% higher cost https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...

andai 1 day ago||

Yeah, everyone else's cache read prices are 10x higher.

Readerium 1 day ago||

I expect 5X cache input price hike, and 2X usual input/output hike.

htrp 1 day ago||

Looks like a second order effect to them not raising their round

elmer2 1 day ago||

Even if DeepSeek is better than the American models, I won't be using it unless there is a flat-rate monthly plan. This is only real way it's useful.

If not, the cost outweighs whatever value I might have gotten from it.

surgical_fire 1 day ago|

lol it doesn't.

I put 10 bucks on DeepSeek almost 3 months ago.

I still have 2 bucks there. I think I used so far something in the vicinity of 300M tokens total.

Even if they double their price it is still cheaper than US models on their flat rate plans, and I don't get locked out for expiring the quota.

miroljub 1 day ago||

From the announcement:

We plan to raise the overall pricing for DeepSeek API services in the near future, with a significant increase expected. Please plan your usage accordingly. The specific pricing plan will be subject to official notice.

Now, the question remains, what does that "significant" mean? Would it still be cheaper than the competition, or did they realize they are too cheap for what they offer?

Given that many inference providers offer DS4 flash for more or less the same input and output token price as DeepSeek, they have good profits even with todays low prices.

_aavaa_ 1 day ago|

It’s all about the cache prices. Those dominate usage, cached tokens are easily >90% if not >95% of all used tokens.

miroljub 1 day ago||

Yes, but I'm not sure. They recently dropped cache prices 10 times. Why would they rudder back after only a few months?

_aavaa_ 1 day ago|||

Don’t know but that’s not my point. My point is that even small absolute value changes in cached token prices will have massive impacts on final cost because of the sensitivity on it. If v4 flash cache prices go from 0.0028 to 0.01, the absolute change looks not that big (and would be a rounding error for input and output costs) but it would explode actual usage costs.

faangguyindia 1 day ago|||

to fund training a far better and capable model.

HarHarVeryFunny 1 day ago||

Doesn't make sense - they very recently said they have plenty of money, and are only limited in training a larger model by lack of GPUs (Huawei as well as NVIDIA) available to buy.

jLaForest 1 day ago||

Does this mean other providers API prices for Deepseek models will also increase?

forsalebypwner 1 day ago|

Not necessarily, but could happen if the new Pro version is released and costs more to run

apercu 1 day ago|

One thing I struggle with is the value proposition. One day on a specific task I'll feel like the model saved me a couple hours of work. Then days like yesterday, the model cost me half the day with context loss, repeating steps already completed, crashing/becoming unresponsive, making unpardonable mistakes in logic.

Please don't tell me I'm holding it wrong.

ygjb 1 day ago|

It's not really possible to help without more information about the models you are using, the harness you are using, and how you use the harness.

You haven't even provided enough information for us to know if you are using the right tool. Saying "the model" in relation to an LLM provider that offers several is like asking for help with using a Dewalt or Milwaukee to help assemble an cabinet. Are you cutting, drilling, hammering, screwing?

apercu 1 day ago||

I'm speaking pretty generally here - the tasks vary, as do the models and the way I access them. The point I was making is that they are inconsistent hour to hour, much less day to day and require a very disciplined mindset to babysit, which is sometimes harder than the actual task in play.

They do "unstuck" me sometimes. There is value in that. But the value is inconsistent - which was my original point.

ygjb 1 day ago||

Ah yeah, but that's not an AI problem in general. The models are trained on human language and human centered expression. I realized after re-reading, that my comment was more harsh than I intended, I really was trying to be helpful. The first step of asking for help should be asking if you have framed the question or task correctly, that way you build your own understanding of what you are asking the model to help you with. For better or worse, under the hood, the computer is a machine following instructions that largely appear non-deterministic, so if you don't frame the inference request correctly, it just boils down to a GIGO problem.

It's probably not what you want to hear, but are you sure you were holding the tool correctly? At least with this tool, you can actually ask it :D

apercu 12 hours ago||

Eh, it’s my fault as I was more blowing off steam than asking for help - I had a long week where in the middle of it my tooling cost me few hours of time but at the end of the week I can say that in spite of that I probably saved 10 hours of work this week _because_ of the tooling.

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