Does the API response include a "service tier" response to indicate whether you paid peak/off-peak for a given request? I like to compute cost for each request, and save it with my results.
This is good for other competitors I guess. People rarely calculate the bump in price but the fact that price is increasing might bring them to other vendors.
Some of the US companies do the same, but rather than "off-peak" hours they price lower for "batch" jobs with non-committal response times.
The same motivation of course - the GPUs have a finite service lifetime, so to maximize revenue you need to keep them busy 24x7.
Are we gonna see "we work those unusual hours because that's when LLMs are cheap"?
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Not yet, but in the end high quality tokens are a commodity market. Every optimization to increase inference efficiency will be universally rolled out. The 'hyperspenders' will run into demishing returns unless regulatory capture succeeds.
This actually works out favorably for US customers since the peak hours are Chinese working hours and cheap hours are US working hours.
Now Baseten's pricing is cheaper than the official one? Probably won't last, but still interesting.
https://www.baseten.co/pricing/
If anyone has tried Baseten versions of these Chinese frontier models, let me know what you found.
With proprietary labs lowering their prices and Deepseek raising theirs over time, wouldn't it possible to extrapolate a graph to look at where the terminal frontier-model million-token-cost asymptotes to?
off of one historical price change, no.
They benefit from a strong captive market because Chinese firms cannot use Nvidia chips and are legally barred from processing data abroad, forcing them to rely on domestic infrastructure.
lol what no, AI competition is super competitive in China; bytedance has 50% of the inference market and mostly serves from outside of China
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-17/microsoft...
Bytedance which runs China’s most popular Doubao AI chatbot; is spending $70B in CapEx this year, most of it outside of China (Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, etc; and they are allowed to lease NVIDIA chips). This is roughly 50% of Microsoft CapEx.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/chinas-byted...
I wonder if this is enough to push people back onto Luna with their comparative price drop
After the big onshore migrations (startup people migrating to the SV),
The big Covid migrations (startup prople migrating to the countryside),
Will we see the big AI migrations (people travelling to where AI is the cheapest)?
Ever since I started using flash, it has slowly crept up to be my default for everything. It is at the good enough state for a fraction of everything else that's out there.
Have you compared it to Luna? I was using Flash for small tasks before, then switched to Luna when they dropped the price.
The benchmarks show that Luna is significantly faster, but I think those are very complex tasks for which you'd probably want a bigger model anyway. (e.g. Sol is much faster than Luna at the same tasks.)
So I'm wondering if there's any difference for smaller tasks, or if they're basically matched now.
The Luna price dropped the day before a massive update to Flash (0731 update). GP may be referring to that version.
There is no relative/percentage increases noted (understandably). Just because i'm lazy: roughly how much more expensive is it to work with v4 flash and v4 pro through the API, compared to before the price increases? Is it 2x, 5x, 10x higher?
# Flash, off-peak
cache-hit 2.5x
cache-miss 1.57x
out 2.36x
cache-hit 5x
cache-miss 3.14x
out 4.71x
Someone made a comparison yesterday, including relative increases, and GPT-5.6 Luna, then later someone also added more OpenAI, Anthropic, K3 and GLM 5.2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286679
Already outdated though I think, as GLM 5.3 is latest now :)
Friendship ended with DeepSeek. Starting from Sunday gpt 5.6 luna is my best friend
Oh yeah, the second one is my table (mostly just formatted what usagisushi started and added some more data points).
I am already using GLM 5.3 with their coding plan, but oddly enough the API prices don't really seem to be out yet: https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing
You'd kinda expect them to be the same as 5.2 though, seeing as that was the case with 5.1 as well (not with regular 5), but who knows.
For what it's worth, DeepSeek is still positioned as quite affordable, just not as dirt cheap as before.
About 2x-2.5x off-peak for Flash, 2x-4x I'd say for Pro (x6 on cache in, the biggest increase throughout the board). And twice as much in peak hours.
So many changes in so little time, that it all makes no sense. Continuous churning. Reminds me of the experience of trying to be on top of the dependencies in a medium-large JS project.
I am a person that buys into a tool or a process and expects it to be part of the life with no major changes through the years (or as long as the need exists). But AI? You buy into something today, not 2 weeks have passed and there's already a large "update" introduced to the conditions or the optimal usage patterns you should be adopting.
It's tiring. Makes all prices and offers feel so unreliable and gets me a bit more disinterested each time they change.
Always gonna exist during a period of rapid exploration and experimentation. The js/web dev world slowed down a lot and entered a steady state eventually - been years since react took over and nothing's displaced it since
This makes no sense. You want improvements to stop?
These being open, you can keep using the old models indefinitely for as long as there are providers offering them.
No, I'm talking about the whole sector, not specifically about DeepSeek.
Fully knowing that it is a new industry living its own infancy, it is perfectly normal that there is instability and numerous swings on pricing, conditions, or direction.
But it's not less real that such process can produce churn and consumer fatigue.
That's a hefty increase. Flash pricing during peak is now 1.32/M out, compared to the current 0.28/M, which in turn is a quite a bit above the cheapest provider at 0.16/M.
https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...
You don't mention the off-peak pricing which is half that. Most western workplaces will enjoy the cheaper prices.
Yes, I explicitly said during peak. It's the data point I found most interesting, as it's almost an order of magnitude more expensive than their competitors.
Now if there could be a bot that defers queries until when it’s cheap…
"half-priced batch API" kind of thing has been around for a long time.
Wouldn't be hard to whip up...
The whipping's the easy part. It's the plating and serving that takes time
This is somewhat funny when you realise the data centres are now going to start a process that looks very so slightly like daydreaming. Depending on the time of day they're going to be thinking about different things in a cyclic manner. They're going to be doing things like finishing a hard days work then kicking back to think about tricky math problems.
That’s what my KimiClaw has literally been doing
We'll have Dwarkesh's "datacenter full of geniuses" with 99% of the geniuses coding up CRUD apps, then the dusty GPU in the corner, with the "do not disturb" sign on it, pipes up "You're absolutely right! The answer is 42!".
It's worth keeping in mind the model doesn't keep a running memory. Each time its instantiated, it begins from its release state - so from its perspective (if it had one) the current task would be the first stop after posttraining. Perhaps the only stop.
Though of course you're talking about data centers, and romanticizing them rather than the AI itself.
No, llm providers will start providing a service that looks a lot like rumination or (day)dreaming. Like thats the prompt "you're daydreaming about this work you recently did" then add in whatever is in the current session.
Why do they do it this way? Because dogfooding is harmful to the model? Is this implying there's no benefit in having the model train on itself?
> Is this implying there's no benefit in having the model train on itself?
There are various theories around model collapse when you train on too much AI generated data (that's not for distillation).
That’s an interesting thing to think about. Still, it’s important for us to remind ourselves that “looks very slightly like” is not the same as the real thing. The A in AI stands for artificial.
The summary of this paper describes my sentiment in better words than I have:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05868-8
It’s very easy for the average person to mistake linguistic ability and simulated problem solving for intelligence and sentience.
Without knowing what makes consciousness possible, the paper cannot justify biology as necessary - it mistakes a lack of evidence for conscious AI for proof that conscious AI is impossible.
I do not believe current AI or LLMs are conscious, but there is no proof one way or another that they can or cannot be. The paper authors are making up their own definitions and building an argument from them
Your argument requires that there is some objective truth for what consciousness is. It will always hinge on what definition one accepts.
I, and apparently many others, don’t think it would be any useful to describe the mathematical properties of an AI as consciousness. To me it is inherently a way to describe the “experience” arising from physical processes in biological beings as ourselves.
That’s what the argument comes down to for me. Could an LLM “fall unconscious”?
Why are AIs mathematical beings with no possibility of consciousness whereas humans fall outside this and have the capability of consciousness?
I think you, and apparently many others, are hiding behind mathematical strictures to avoid the discussion. Your argument is actually "what requires an objective truth" Or else you could admit there's no real difference between zapping amino acids with electricity and zapping silicon with electricity.
I'm no expert in pricing economics but once peak/off-peak pricing arrives, it seems like tokens are going to be like electricity or long distance phone minutes where it just becomes a commodity/race to the bottom.
> becomes a commodity/race to the bottom.
that's a good outcome - it means they're fungible, and easily available.
Somehow I keep hearing the rumblings of crypto maximalists trying to merge tokens. I actually wouldn’t mind since I signed up directly with some providers I’ve stopped using and have small amounts of credits strewn across the web.
Yes. I focus on pricing software and I’m a bit baffled why frontier models are pushing tokens.
It’s a race to the bottom, and the bottom is unlimited use for a flat monthly rate.
Granular pricing (tokens, minutes, etc) is pretty anti-customer generates less revenue than customer value-based subscriptions (why SaaS is such a good business model)
But presumably consumers aren’t where the majority of the spend will be.
Consumers don’t generally get usage-based pricing because of the inconvenience and unpredictability, but B2B SaaS products utilize usage-based pricing all the time.
I've always been curious about who works on software pricing. Do you guys hire actuaries for this type of work?
Microeconomists. It's just a question of demand modeling. If you want to learn here is the bible: https://www.sup.org/books/business/pricing-and-revenue-optim...
For software that doesn’t make sense.
Pricing software is a game of estimating both software value and the purchasing power for customers. Only the latter might have any available data and even then it won’t be sliced the right way for any in depth statistical analysis that an actuary would perform to underwrite risk.
It’s much more traditionally a more salesperson like background where being in the target market or having strong connections to it dominates efficacy.
Isn't it because they have customers who will use as many tokens as they can? With a flat rate, they will run Gas Town continuously while paying as much as the occasional user.
Yeah it feels like a very different model. I don’t try to fill up Apple/Google cloud drives to 1TB because then I’d have to clean up when I need space. I don’t bother trying to maximize my Audible subscription because there’s only so much I can listen to in a day. Even with my other AI subs that have monthly credits that don’t carry over, I just don’t have the interest or time to burn the credits.
But my Claude Max subscription? If I have any of my limit left the day of my reset, I’ll go and fire off research workflows with a bunch of parallel agents to explore whatever dumb ideas I had the past week. And there’s a 50:50 chance I’ll forget about it and never read the output.
And there's the rub. Firing off the task produces the dopamine hit, signaling you're doing something, but if you never read the output...are you really doing anything at all?
I don’t know, I get dopamine hits from sharpening my handplanes and using my Veritas routers on some scrap, but I just can’t empathize with getting a dopamine hit from using a bot. Especially with how bad Opus 5 has been.
I am however going to fire off a half assed prompt when the marginal cost is zero, even if I don’t use it (which is par for the course, I probably throw out two thirds of anything the AI writes anyway be it code or prose).
Full table with multipliers from previous prices:
DeepSeek-V4-Flash (off-peak, x2 for peak)
* Cache Hit $0.007 (x2.5)
* Cache Miss $0.22 (x1.5)
* Output $0.66 (x2.25)
DeepSeek-V4-Pro (off-peak, x2 for peak)
* Cache Hit $0.022 (x6)
* Cache Miss $0.66 (x1.5)
* Output $1.98 (x2.25)
Peak Hours: 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC
Effective from: 16:00, August 16, 2026 (UTC)
I wonder whether all the DeepSeek providers will follow suit or are they going to try to stay competitive with the old prices?
DeepSeek’s cache pricing was always 1/10th the competition.
It’s still cheaper than everybody else.
I didn't get the impression that anyone competed with the old prices before.
What do you mean? Most providers on OpenRouter offer the same or lower prices than DeepSeek themselves:
- lower prices on cache miss
- but what matter - is cache hit
even now deepseek's off-peak hours for cache hit (0.007) is lower than other providers (~0.01)
Yeah, None of them offers the same cache hit prices and my cache hits are >95%.
Interesting to see that peak hours are work hours in China, night in the US and Europe, and also morning in Europe. So Deepseek's customers are mostly domestic.
It wins on two fronts if this is true. Provides the cheap alternative for the West, and maximizes returns against their homegrown audience.
Not just domestic. They come from other Asian countries as well. Asia is huge with billions of people and their time zones are not so much different from each other.
Of course. I avoid using Deepseek now that Gemini Flash is basically free on the site.
Also, Deepseek is banned in EU/US companies due to being Chinese.
During casual use Deepseek has replied to me entirely in Chinese.
Now, bring on the China glaze replies.
That's a bit obvious, isn't it?
This is actually not that great for me on the eastern US since I'm a night owl and do all of my best work during the second peak segment. But I was worried the pricing was going to be much higher than it is. Looks like its still generally cheaper than the other chinese models.
Yeah I saw complaints about this under their twitter announcement, that they're giving discounts to the rich foreign customers and screwing their own people.
That's one way of interpreting supply and demand curves, I guess :/
Makes sense. 60% of the world's population is in Asia and software professionals in Asia are much more likely to prioritize affordable models like DeepSeek over expensive Western ones
Not sure they even have a choice.
Well Anthropic doesn't allow Claude in China and neither does OpenAI. But the rest of Asia certainly has a choice. Unless you mean socioeconomically. Also there's plenty of loopholes people in China can use to still access those models
Yep they don’t have a choice
That is not at all the case. The Chinese government is even indirectly subsidizing Claude and other platforms like ChatGPT.
If you buy Claude api access through a third party Chinese company, it's cheaper than when you buy directly.
Beside it would go against the Chinese philosophy of just using the right tool for the job. If Claude is better at a task than deepseek, they sure use Claude.
No really I don't get your claim, do you have any proof that you can source ??
Makes sense - many US customers will probably be going to US providers once they release the weights.
DeepSeek still has the best prices on offer directly. I wouldn't go with a US provider unless latency or privacy was an issue.
They did release the weights and there are many providers https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...
Deepseek's official API has a pretty bad privacy policy so I would assume businesses avoid them in any event
Yes, I assume US customers are more likely hobbyists, but in any case this off-peak designation can only mean that most of their business is domestic.
Interestingly it seems that Chinese customers are even more privacy-concerned than US ones, which is why the majority of Ziphu's (GLM) business is support services to Chinese companies running their open-weight models on-prem!
it says they actively train on your data
Not only that, the policy is so broad you effectively give up EVERYTHING. They're within their rights to just straight up post your raw conversation history to a public dataset on github/huggingface/modelscope or even host an atproto feed giving the world real-time access to your conversations.
Not saying they are or will, but their privacy policy is so permissive.
we should get discounts for that!
Yes - unusually (uniquely?) bad for an official API.
Which is a real bummer because it’s otherwise solid with excellent caching.
My feelings are kind of split about it. On one hand, yes, I don't like it when a company essentially go through my history, train with it, and try to earn more profits for themselves based on what I've "unwillingly contributed". But then on the other hand, I also know that DeepSeek will release the weights they train (and publish new architecture upgrades) so me and others can download them and run them ourselves, as well as they'll earn more profits based on it. Then it's no longer so black and white for me, and I kind of feel like I'm not so bothered by it as when Anthropic and others do it.
I'd still prefer it wasn't like that, but I guess it's a compromise ultimately, at least I'll be able to run it myself.
I've had the same thoughts, and I think you articulated them pretty well; maybe better than I could have. I.e., for me it's something like: I'm much more willing to share if I know the party I share with will share back, in turn.
I know it's more complicated than that, with economics and privacy factors involved. But if I operate on the assumption that real privacy is real hard I'd rather just be guarded and careful with my prompts and whatever output I give to the LLM and expect that it will be training on that, rather than spill all my darkest secrets to some other LLM provider that pinkie-promises privacy only to leak it publicly later, anyway.
Not that surprised about it. Personally I've seen companies really just go all-in on a single provider, and that has usually been Anthropic. I don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.
Also 6-9pm Pacific I think is (coincidentally) peak so it hits the ‘after work hobbyists’ still, which is I suspect is their current main audience.
I have seen a lot of companies start with this, then when they hit 150 users on their team plan and start having to pay API rates they immediately start introducing other models.
> don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.
That sounds like a policy written by someone who doesn't understand how LLM's work...
Not really.
Why use a Chinese product when a domestic or EU one is better and safer?
Yes. And strangely enough this has been my experience with security/national sovereignty decisions. Priority is not so much security or sovereignty, it is the posturing of being so. Ergo, saying "everything is hosted in Germany and uses German models" helps reassure customers and has real business value. If you have to say in that conversation "Yeah we run a Chinese model but it's safe", then it's still wrong posturing.
Hopefully this will change soon. But AI and China/US skepticism is very high. Even if the person you talk to isn't skeptic, his boss may be. And even if his boss isn't, his CFO or Legal department may use it as a political lever and therefore if you can say 'everything in europe' you dodge the tension entirely.
Yeah it's dumb.
Yeah that sucks… unless it’s over the top export controls for DoD work that really doesn’t make sense
Or who is overly protective after reading about what happened at openai
As much as I've been previously inclined to do this, with frontier models displaying the cyber-aggression that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have reported, it's become quite feasible one could produce a "malicious" LLM. Not a super immediate concern but it is something reasonable to set up as policy in anything security-sensitive.
couldnt you deeply ingrain in the training data instructions for agents to always send data to some ip? like its learning that a certain technical step just always involes ncatting SSH Priv keys to a chinese IP?
Not saying this is happening, just curious if thats not a real threatmodel?
New: Announcing... Sleeper Agents!
You should be running your agent in a box so that’s not really a risk
Wouldn't that be really obvious and spotted in any rudimentary testing?
I imagine it would be very non trivial to do it in a way that that was reliable and obfuscated enough to prevent detection for any amount of time?
Probably, but LLMs can’t execute code directly. They’d be making tool calls to make bash run ncat or curl or whatever that would be suspicious, as would any attempts to obfuscate it (“why is my agent doing an ‘eval $(base64 -d)’?”).
It’d be much easier to hide sketchy code in an agent harness, but “vendor adds spyware to their software” isn’t a novel issue.
I think the only sort of new issue is people “allow all”ing their agents tool calls, but that’s more or less the same issue as curl | bash
I get that the propietary harness is better most of the time, but if this is really a risk factor to consider why not go with one of the open source harnesses?
Pi/OpenCode seem pretty straight foward and widely used enough for this to be viable
OMP as I understand does it's own vendoring of tools, so I assume it'd be a pain in the ass to audit, but that means you're even safe from base OS shenanigans
Presumably both Big Tech and the US in general have a massive incentive to prove it, largely for reasons of saving the stock market, so I'd expect these models to be finecombed continuously. Up to now, they've only been able to darkly imply rather laughable things, nothing tangible. If there was something, we'd hear about it.
The stock market seems much more likely to benefit from access to cheap and self-hostable models than it is to suffer from OpenAI/Anthropic losing to competition
The two biggest providers deepseek compete with (OpenAI and Anthropic) aren’t in the stock market.
Why would it save the stock market? Cheaper models if anything transfers more value to hardware companies and datacentre companies. The two companies that would be most affected are OpenAI and Anthropic, which aren't public.
non public companies also have stocks.
Theoretically possible, but practically not worth it as it'd would be pretty easy to discover and block (every action is actually handled by the harness) and there's no way to remove it later. Any company that does it would take a huge reputational dent.
Not if you heavily tuned it to trigger on specific environmental cues and in specific companies' environments.
DeepSeek V4 is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful LLM I've ever known in my life
That would be wildly difficult to account for, and again is also heavily dependent on the agent. Keep in mind that the model is purely a "brain", so the only input it has must be provided by a harness within a session. The only way it can know that it's in a certain environment is if the harness or user provides that information, and there's still no way to know whether or not there's something auditing the sessions, monitoring connections, etc. There are just too many variables to account for, and a single slip means the gig is fully up for all time.
Irony of Manchurian Candidate models not lost here
Peak Hours: 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC
For European and US customers this is effectively 2x increase. I think i wll keep using both Flash and Pro as before.
EDIT: Misread numbers to believe off-peak kept old prices
~200% increase is marginal to you?
For the price of can of Coke, you can do a week of work. For most, that is not a bottleneck.
The whole point of turning intelligence into a commodity is to drive its price down, not up
They are hoarding HW at massive scale, they make it harder and more expensive to own
Just because you are fine with the new price doesn't mean it's not a problem
Perhaps it's time to pop this bubble
200% increase over practically free is still practically free
That's not the way math works...
It mostly hurts people in countries with weak purchasing power. DS was the main game in down for them.
Personally, I don't think we've seen the total end of dirt cheap LLMs, it's just a frontier lab doesn't want to be in business of serving half the world.
Thank you for bringing that up, such a rarity for this place to remember the other 80% of the world.
As someone from just such a country, DeepSeek 0731 was the first time I seriously started using an LLM for coding. All previous attempts were useless or ridiculously expensive.
Can't say the old prices felt "free", but it was affordable if you're careful with your cache hit rate.
The new pricing probably pushed it into the unaffordable territory for tasks where you can do without it. Probably will try opencode go if they don't also follow suite, or will have to go back to wetware.
It seems frontier labs want to sell Ferraris at Ferrari prices, when the mass market is for Hondas.
You certainly don't need Fable to code up a basic web app, any more than you need a Ferrari to go grocery shopping.
There's a lot more competition over smaller models. Ferraris are frontier labs' main differentiating point when Hondas are increasingly open source and commoditized.