The company that started the price war is raising prices — DeepSeek by up to 1,100% from Sunday
DeepSeek shipped the finished V4 Pro on 13 August and said new API pricing takes effect at 16:00 UTC on 16 August. The increases run from about 50% to more than 1,100%, depending on the model, the token type and the time of day. V4 Pro is listed at $1.32 per million input tokens and $3.96 per million output, against $0.14 and $0.28 for V4 Flash. The company is also introducing peak and off-peak billing, with peak hours set at 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC and off-peak rates at half of peak. The sharpest rise is on cache hits, from $0.003625 to $0.022 off-peak and $0.044 at peak. DeepSeek frames the change as a way to spread demand across the day rather than as a margin decision.
Why it mattersThe cache number is the one that bites. Agents that re-read the same files at every step lived on cheap cache hits; a six- to twelve-fold rise there changes what a long coding session costs, and not by a rounding error. But the direction matters more than the size. DeepSeek is the company whose pricing forced the Western labs to cut theirs — the Financial Times reported this week that OpenAI and Anthropic are still cutting to hold cost-conscious customers. Now the cheap end is getting expensive because the servers are full. Cheap inference was never a property of the technology. It was a property of who had spare capacity.
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