Overview
- DeepSeek confirmed on Friday that the 75% promotional discount for its V4‑Pro API is now permanent, changing the offer from a time‑limited promotion to a standing price tier.
- The firm fixed non‑cached input at $0.435 per million tokens and output at $0.87 per million tokens, and it cut input cache‑hit costs by 90% across its API line.
- DeepSeek frames the pricing as an alternative for developers and enterprises complaining about restrictive usage caps from Western providers and says the cuts make heavy, repetitive workloads far cheaper.
- Developers report that single API keys still face per‑key rate limits, so scaling high‑throughput use cases may require multi‑key load balancing or third‑party proxies to avoid 429 errors.
- The pricing move follows V4’s preview launch with a one‑million‑token context window and Huawei Ascend support, and observers link the strategy to DeepSeek’s push for market share and reported large fundraising plans amid U.S. regulatory scrutiny.