DeepSeek’s steep V4-Pro price cut escalates AI pricing war
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has announced a steep price cut for its recently launched flagship AI model, V4-Pro. The company has reduced pricing for the model by 75%, just a month after unveiling the V4 generation, which includes V4 Pro and V4 Flash. Earlier, usage costs ranged from $0.0145 for one million tokens (cache hit) to $3.48 for one million output tokens. Following the revision, the V4 Pro will now cost starting at $0.003625 per million tokens and going up to $0.87 per million tokens, respectively. The Deepseek V4 Pro model API pricing will be officially adjusted to 1/4 of the original price after the 75% discount promotion ends on 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC, said the company. “V4-Pro was engineered to cut the cost of long-context inference, reportedly running at roughly a quarter of the single-token compute and a tenth of the memory footprint of its predecessor at very long context. This is why the price cut is permanent rather than promotional. It is not a discount. It is an effic