Disclaimer: deepseek.ai is an independent community and fan site, not officially affiliated with DeepSeek AI. Rates reflect DeepSeek's first-party API pricing as reported by Artificial Analysis and may change. See our pricing page for the current live rates and the newer surge-pricing model.
Announced 23 May 2026: DeepSeek has made its temporary 75% price cut on the first-party V4 Pro API permanent. The move puts V4 Pro firmly on the Pareto frontier of intelligence-vs-cost, alongside V4 Flash.
The New V4 Pro Pricing
| Token Type | Previous / 1M | New / 1M | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input | $1.74 | $0.435 | −75% |
| Output | $3.48 | $0.87 | −75% |
| Cached input | — | $0.0036 | ~99.8% off input |
Using Artificial Analysis's standard 7:2:1 blended pricing, V4 Pro lands at roughly $0.18 per 1M blended tokens.
Running the Intelligence Index: What It Costs
- DeepSeek V4 Pro: ~$268
- Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview: ~$892 — V4 Pro is ~3× cheaper
- GPT-5.5 (xhigh): ~$3,357 — V4 Pro is ~12× cheaper
- Claude Opus 4.7 (max): ~$5,117 — V4 Pro is ~19× cheaper
V4 Pro sits in the upper-right "most attractive quadrant" of the intelligence-vs-cost chart while costing a fraction to run.
Why DeepSeek Can Do This
- MoE efficiency. V4's sparse 1.6T-parameter MoE architecture activates only a small slice of the network per token; inference cost scales with active parameters, not total parameters.
- Compressed attention. The compressed-attention mechanism cuts KV-cache pressure — the dominant cost of long-context inference.
- Aggressive prefix caching. The $0.0036/1M cached-input rate (a ~99.8% discount vs. fresh input) makes agentic workflows and long system prompts almost free on the input side. This is the lever pulling blended pricing down to ~$0.18.
Combined with DeepSeek's recently-closed ~$7.4B funding round, the lab has both the capital runway and architectural edge to sustain frontier-tier pricing pressure.
What This Means for Builders
- Agentic systems: Multi-step agents that cost $5–20 per task on Claude Opus or GPT-5.5 can run on V4 Pro for cents.
- Long-context RAG: Prefix caching at $0.0036/1M makes 100K+ token system prompts economically viable.
- Reasoning at scale: Workloads that used to fall back to R-series for cost reasons no longer have to compromise.
- Open-weight fallback: Because V4 is open-weight, you can self-host the same architecture if first-party pricing ever changes.
Note on Surge Pricing
DeepSeek has since layered a peak-hour surge premium on top of these permanent base rates and retired the legacy deepseek-chat / deepseek-reasoner endpoints. Off-peak base rates below still apply; peak-hour multipliers now apply on top.
Bottom Line
Making the 75% cut permanent reframes the entire frontier-AI cost curve. At ~$0.18 blended per 1M tokens, V4 Pro is meaningfully redefining what frontier-tier reasoning costs to operate. Western labs face a choice: match the pricing, differentiate on capability, or watch high-volume workloads migrate.