> EDIT: formatting

Keep at it, I believe in you.

The problem with DS Flash/Pro is that they are extreme reasoning heavy and step heavy. Step = cache hit. Reasoning = output hit. So the impact on those price increases will be felt much stronger.

I think that Flash is still a usable model but Pro is DOA... Even before the price difference between Flash and Pro, vs the intelligence / problem solving / tool calling did not make sense. But now that gap has widen even more. And there are just too many competitors models now close to that Pro price range.

Especially when we compare that competitive models offer subscription services that easily cut down the token price by 1:10. That makes Pro especially a bad value.

We shall see what the 3th party market is going to do, but i suspect that prices will be increased. If the argument was that DeepSeek increases price as they lack capacity, a company with access to billions, other 3th party providers that need to rent and have less optimized infrastructures will increase prices. Especially if they get hit hard with people moving around.

Its like we always see the same issue with popular models.

* GLM 5.2 is good, capacity issues, API price up, subscription heavy nerfs. * Kimi K3 is good, capacity issues, API price up, subscription heavy nerfs. * DeepSeek V4 GA is good, capacity issues, API price up * OpenAI GLM 5m, 10m active users. Subscription usage is sneakily tightened more and more. * Anthropic Opus too popular, ...

That is the main issue. The AI users are people who actively easily move between companies. Pushing peak loads to each unprepared company, releasing load on the "less desired". And round we go ...

How could that possibly work? Deepseek was undercutting every other provider by an order of magnitude on cached tokens.

Do they just set a super low caching time and hope that drops effective cache rates low enough? Do all other providers somehow overcharge by that much? Are they just going to sell it as a loss leader?

I doubt they will match old cache read pricing- that’s most important in agentic coding.

Luna has one vendor and they can change the price any time. Deepseek is open and has dozens of vendors competing to serve it.

Luna vs v4 Flash, sure.

But DeepSeek v4 Pro is a far more capable model and still cheaper than anything that it competes with, from what I can see.

Why not? They probably only offered those deals because of DeepSeek aggressive pricing. Now that DeepSeek is 3x more expensive it's time to revert those discounts.

It does seem to me that DeepSeek themselves aren't so much interested in being a service provider. They do it, and offer the service, but their pronouncements seem to be that they're more interested in being for now closer to a research lab with a longer term play for something more dramatic later.

Unfortunately in this case that's not true at all, there was no provider with genuinely close or the same effective prices (mostly based on cache hit cost) to old v4 flash or v4 pro. People have this misconception that other providers must be much cheaper than the official one in case of open weight models.

If you check on OpenRouter, some other providers serve V4 Flash at seemingly cheaper normal input/output tokens rates, but with a huge caveat: they have at least a 5x increase of the cache hit cost of the official API, some have a 10x+. No provider comes close to Deepseek's old low cache prices, and cache is 90%+ of what matters in agentic sessions.

Closest comparison:

- Deepseek: $0.14/$0.28 with $0.0028 cache hit cost for official API

- DeepInfra: $0.08/$0.18 (cheaper base rates!) with $0.016 cache hit (almost 6x!! Deepseek's current cache cost)

Another great example is Kimi K3, official API is $3/$15 and the cheapest provider on OpenRouter is $2.8/$14, only a tiny difference.

The question is if they'll increase prices as well.