DeepSeek API Pricing
The Chinese lab behind the DeepSeek open-weight models. Spun out of quant hedge fund High-Flyer in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, it shocked the industry by matching frontier reasoning quality at a fraction of the cost — and shipping the weights under an MIT license.
DeepSeek V4 Flash
Replaces deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner naming (those are being deprecated and now route to V4 Flash non-thinking / thinking modes).
DeepSeek V4 Pro
Currently 75% off through May 31, 2026 — list price reverts to $1.74 input / $3.48 output after that date.
DeepSeek V3 LAUNCHED DEC 2024
Original DeepSeek V3 (model name deepseek-chat at launch).
DeepSeek R1 LAUNCHED JAN 2025
First-generation reasoning model (deepseek-reasoner at launch).
| Model | Input /M | Output /M | Cached | Context | Max output | Vision | Tools | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | $0.14 | $0.28 | $0.0−98% | 1M | — | ✗ | ✓ | Active |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro FLAGSHIP | $0.43 | $0.87 | $0.0−99% | 1M | — | ✗ | ✓ | Frontier |
| DeepSeek V3 RETIRED | — | — | — | Retired Apr 26, 2026 | → deepseek-v4-flash | ✗ | ✗ | Retired |
| DeepSeek R1 RETIRED | — | — | — | Retired Apr 26, 2026 | → deepseek-v4-pro | ✗ | ✗ | Retired |
The DeepSeek story so far.
A short, loud history: V3 → R1 → V4, with V4 arriving 484 days after V3. Sourced from DeepSeek's API docs, model cards, and contemporaneous coverage.
deepseek-chat/deepseek-reasoner fold into V4; V3 + R1 retiredplatform.deepseek.com — direct API with an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, dev console, and billing. Prices are list-low; cache-hit input is ~1/10 of base.
OPEN-WEIGHT · SELF-HOSTV4 Pro + V4 Flash weights ship under the MIT license on Hugging Face — fully self-hostable with no per-token fee and no China-routing of your data.
CONSUMER · APPchat.deepseek.com plus iOS/Android apps — free consumer chat that briefly topped the US App Store in early 2025. No API; for end-user usage.
THIRD-PARTY · HOSTSBecause the weights are MIT-licensed, third-party inference hosts (Together, Fireworks, and others) serve DeepSeek V4 from US/EU regions — useful when China data residency is a blocker.
DeepSeek was founded in July 2023 in Hangzhou by Liang Wenfeng, who also co-founded and runs the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer (started in 2015–2016). DeepSeek is owned and funded by High-Flyer rather than by external venture capital — an unusual structure that let it train large models on a GPU cluster the fund had already built for trading.
The lab's signature is compute efficiency. Its mixture-of-experts (MoE) training recipes delivered frontier-class quality at a small fraction of the budgets reported by US labs. Liang has reportedly held a controlling personal stake (~84% as of 2024), and the team is famously lean — on the order of ~150 people, with many hired straight out of university.
DeepSeek's breakout moment came with V3 (December 2024) and then R1 (January 2025): R1 matched OpenAI o1-class reasoning at roughly 1/27 the price, the consumer app briefly topped the US App Store, and the release triggered a sharp sell-off in AI hardware stocks. In April 2026 the lab shipped the V4 family — a 1.6T-parameter MoE (V4 Pro) and a 284B MoE (V4 Flash), both with 1M-token context and MIT-licensed open weights.
Pricing is the headline: V4 Pro runs at $0.435/$0.87 per M under a 75% launch promo (reverting to $1.74/$3.48 after May 31, 2026), and V4 Flash at $0.14/$0.28 — roughly an order of magnitude below frontier US models, with cache-hit input cut to about 1/10 of base.
The trade-offs are real: models are text-only (no native vision or audio), the company is China-based with data stored in China by default, and US export-control and procurement-policy questions apply. The MIT weights are the escape hatch — teams that need US/EU residency can self-host. Versus OpenAI and Anthropic, DeepSeek trades multimodal breadth and Western data governance for radically lower cost and full open weights.
Alibaba (Qwen)
Broad open-weight Qwen lineup with strong multilingual + multimodal coverage and Alibaba Cloud distribution. Comparable Chinese-data-residency questions apply.
PRIMARY RIVALOpenAI
Frontier benchmarks + multimodal + ecosystem (GPT-5, ChatGPT, Azure). But ~10× pricier input, closed weights, and US data residency.
FRONTIER LEADERAnthropic
Leads coding + reasoning with Claude and zero-retention defaults. But far higher prices, no open weights, and no China-cost story.
OPEN-WEIGHT PEERMistral
EU-native open weights (Apache 2.0) with GDPR-first data residency. Comparable openness, but trails DeepSeek on raw cost-per-token.
Meta
Llama open weights at huge scale and a Western governance posture. But no managed low-cost API like DeepSeek's, and a different licensing model.
Frequently asked.
Practical questions about DeepSeek pricing, open weights, and data residency.
Q · 01 Which DeepSeek model should I start with? +
$0.14/$0.28) — it covers both non-thinking and thinking modes cheaply. Step up to V4 Pro ($0.435/$0.87 on promo) for the hardest reasoning. Both ship a 1M-token context. See the use case picker above.Q · 02 How much cheaper is DeepSeek than OpenAI or Anthropic? +
$0.435 vs $5) and ~34× cheaper on output ($0.87 vs $30). With cache-hit input at $0.0036/M the gap widens further. The honest caveat: DeepSeek is text-only and trails on multimodal.Q · 03 Is there an off-peak discount? +
Q · 04 Are DeepSeek models open-weight? +
Q · 05 Where is my data stored, and is that a problem? +
Q · 06 What happens after the 75% promo ends on May 31, 2026? +
$1.74/M input and $3.48/M output (¼ of the original launch list). Even at list, that remains far below frontier US models. V4 Flash pricing ($0.14/$0.28) is not part of the promo.