You're assuming inference providers are going to sell tokens at cost. You're also assuming that the inference providers have will optimized inference engine. I haven't seen that to be the case so far, to be honest.

Take a look at GLM 5 vs GLM 5.2 pricing -- GLM 5.2 cost more despite being the same model.

Take a look a look at DeepSeek, which hosts DS v4, profitably, yet others aren't able or willing to match the price.

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NitpickLawyer 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'll be honest, I typed that message while having morning coffee, so it's just a quick reaction from my part, not a heavily researched article in a journal :)

But I do think that the median price where this settles will tell us something about the floor at which it is profitable to serve this model.

> DeepSeek, which hosts DS v4, profitably

I specifically mentioned 3rd party providers, because there can be an argument that model creators themselves are subsidising tokens to gather training data for the next model. In fact, ds are public about their gathering of data (at least on openrouter they're marked as such). So that 0.x price point for dsv4-pro is likely subsidised.

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Palmik an hour ago | parent [-]

Based on the best available information, DeepSeek is pricing the API such that they can repay their infra capex over 10 months, while deprecating/amortizing the cost of said infra over 3 years.

For my product, I run GLM 5.2 and other models myself, in production, on rented hardware. Paying API prices would cost much more.

EDIT: You can now see several other third-party providers for Kimi K3 (Nebius, Fireworks). All charge exactly the same as the first-party. Does that mean that their costs are the same? Seems quite unlikely. It's simply not an efficient market, yet.

	▲	throwdbaaway an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They need to get a license from moonshot to provide inference for K3. Probably have to follow the pricing set by moonshot as well.

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trollbridge 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Xioami's MiMo did match DS-V4's price, although we now know that DeepSeek set their pricing lower than they could have, due to the leaked memo, and simply decided to use "10 months to recover capex" as their yardstick. Interestingly "10 months to recover capex" is also the same price SpaceX is renting space to Anthropic and Google for.

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nl 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it's unclear the the DS hosted prices are profitable. AFAIK that haven't claimed that.

OTOH, the multiple providers who have settled around the same price point ($3.48/M output tokens for multiple providers with good reputations) does indicate where it is profitable: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro#providers