alt Hacker NewsDeepSeek to Make Permanent 75% Discount on Flagship AI Model
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Kudos to the DeepSeek folks for making tokens not only affordable but also open source. This is a race to the bottom for token costs in a good way.
I'm sure the frontier labs figured out very clever ways to leverage user input and actions as data for training and signals for RL. DeepSeek wants in on the game.
Amusing that just when the big three AI providers from US raise prices significantly, even for the mini models, you’ve got a Chinese model slashing their already-cheap offer by 75%. Not to mention you can run this model on your own hardware, although admittedly even the flash stretches the meaning of local for individual people.
It’s wild. Regardless of Deepseek direct pricing, on Openrouter itself, the pricing for Pro is comparable to Haiku. Flash is even cheaper. You get Opus 4.5 and better than Sonnet 4.6 performance.
Alternative article:
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/china3...
I wish they had a coding plan like Z.ai, Kimi, Minimax and Xiaomi (MiMo). So instead of paying per million token, I pay a subscription. At the same time, 75% discount is astonishing. I'll just topup and see how far it goes.
I remember when Z.ai had a deal where I paid 7$ for three months, good times.
Great headline cost reduction, but has anyone here actually used the API in production?
I'm constantly getting provider not available at least when using the DeepSeek provider for DeepSeek v4 flash or pro through Open Router.
It seems like there isn't enough capacity to actually serve production traffic
I’m worried about giving a foreign hosted service access to my machine for a coding agent that can run arbitrary commands and read arbitrary files. Coding agent are much more useless if you have to sit there clicking approve on everything.
I'm quite sure (and you could find it somewhere of course) that the Chinese models would've been fine-tuned for certain leanings and world views. Even so, at what point is even the quality risk (assuming your use case won't be affected by those adjustments) and any potential privacy concerns outweighed by the fact that it's literally an order of magnitude (and sometimes multiple, for output tokens etc!) cheaper than the US frontier models?
Turing was half right. Pass his test and you haven't proven a machine can think — you've proven it can make us think it does. That's a far more dangerous thing to have built.
None of the deepseek models are multimodal. How are you guys able to use it in daily work without image input?
For example it's just so natural to share screenshots in a chat.
Is this being done ahead of the big IPOs coming this year? Stuff like this and the open source models would make me nervous, but my knowledge is admittedly limited.
This is the best news ever. Been building with Claude Code + Deepseek and it has blown me away. $10 gets me ENTIRE PROJECTs. Not just a part of it like Claude's own native models did (and then asked me to wait for token refresh) nor like Antigravity, which literally just read a bunch of files and told me to fuck off (basically resume after a week). Atleast it gave me an implementation_plan.md.
OF course I understand this won't be "permanent" permanent. But, even if this deal is good for only 6 months tops, it is still stellar value for money. $10 a month to automate bulk of my grunt work? That's insane.
One thing that I find annoying is that it gives results like a teleprinter and so overall takes longer
anthropic/openai are so cooked with this ngl
While Anthropic, OpenAI and Google continue to charge an expensive amount of $$$ for in/output per million tokens and Microsoft complaining that AI costs more than hiring humans [0] and changes their pricing, it appears that Jevons paradox applies only to Deepseek.
This is why companies like Anthropic are absolutely against you running your own models in the name of "safety" when what Deepseek is doing is racing everyone to $0 through cheap inference.
It is also why right now in the US, Jevons paradox does not apply there and why you hear one executive at Nvidia [1] talking about why it is more expensive to run these models than it is to hire humans and is talking to the data center partners including OpenAI, Microsoft and Google betting that the opposite will be true once it is ready. That could take years.
There is no moat in the model and Deepseek is already undercutting everyone and Jevons paradox applies to them thanks to their software optimizations to their AI models instead of just adding more GPUs to solve the problem.
Good.
[0] https://fortune.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-ai-cost-problem-tok...
I have no idea why people celebrate this. It is replacing one feudal lord by another.
We don't need AI at all. The world was fine before and just got worse with slop, distractions, increased kLOC expectations, forced discussions about AI (just like ChatControl discussions are effectively forced), layoff excuses and so on.
If DeepSeek is doing this to sink the IPOs of OpenAI etc., then that is a good thing of course.
Reminds me of this parking ramp I used to use occasionally. I'd park for hours and when leaving the guy in the booth would tell me the charge and it would always be ridiculously low, like $0.50 or $1.00. Definitely not enough to pay for the guy to sit in the booth.
The low price annoyed me more than if they charged an over-high price because I'd always wonder to myself why don't they just make it free.
China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China.
China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.