There was an interesting discussion on pricing in the recently leaked DeepSeek investor meeting, where CEO Liang Wenfeng went on at length about his personal philosophy on pricing which in the end, for them, comes down to pricing models so as to be able to recoup the cost of the hardware they are running on in 10 months.

He doesn't want to drop prices below that since at their already very cheap prices doing so doesn't increase demand. More interesting are his reasons for not wanting to price higher, which are hard to summarize from memory, but are based around this being a sustainable business model. Pricing higher will only encourage competition.

Note that DeepSeek are not trying to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, at least at this time, acknowledging that they just don't have access to the compute to do so (although they have plently of money). This pricing is not about competing with the west - just his own pricing philosophy.

Maybe DeepSeek is a special case, being a hedge fund, and to large degree developing for their own needs (a bit like Meta, perhaps), but nonetheless they are out there as part of the competitive landscape.

No doubt Anthropic and OpenAI have a radically different strategy on pricing - seemingly more just what the market can bear, but with a company like DeepSeek they are not battling "AI communism", just a de facto competitor with a very different philosophy.

Other companies like Moonshot and Alibaba seem to want to charge as much as possible, at least in part because they are now offering these massive ~3T models that are expensive to serve.