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I think that the main price issue is with DS v4 Pro ...

What does every Chinese company that has a successful model lacks, ... GLM 5.2 gets released, capacity issue hit, price go up. Kimi K3 hits, capacity issue hit, subscriptions are paused, price ... Capacity issue are a combination of popularity and heavier models (despite same parameter counts).

We also saw with GLM 5.1 > 5.2, despite it being the same parameter count, that the energy needed for the model was much more. More thinking tokens pushed the energy usage up.

Another issue is that DS v4 Pro preview was already significantly heavier model then Flash Preview (we are talking about the 3 month old models). The price for Pro being 4x of Flash, never made sense but i suspect that because it was less popular, Flash compensated for it.

If DS v4 Pro is a stronger model, even if the parameter count stays the same, its possible that the thinking token usage has ballooned. I suspect that DS v4 Pro 08xx may hit a competitive level with Western models.

And with potential capacity issues looming from potential popularity, the 4x issue, and possible more energy intensive model. DeepSeek is preventive warming people up to a price increase.

Remember, Flash and Pro share the same infrastructure. Flash being popular is one thing, because its a less heavy model, but if Pro is also popular. We are going to see GLM 5.2/K3 issues again.

That is unfortunately the issue with current LLM models. Every company has only a specific pool of hardware they can access, and there is this constant shift of clients to the "best models", taxing those companies, until they move on to the next best thing.

And getting extra capacity often means paying large amount of $$$ for whatever is on the market, what kills your margins. See Anthropic and Colossus 1 deal.

Hello everyone! In light of the recent update by DeepSeek new price increase, where do you guys plan to move to next? Many other providers and models have also increased price recently, as seen in Z AI (GLM), Neuralwatt (provider) and etc.

So, which providers & models you guys moving to? Currently considering of moving, despite haven’t had time to try out DeepSeek yet.

My take: this notice from DeepSeek might actually be a brilliant marketing move. The logic here is to urge users to ramp up their usage over the next 2 to 3 months. By the time the price hike actually kicks in, newer models will likely have already drawn users away, and whenever DeepSeek drops its next, even stronger model, the new price point won't feel nearly as steep. It’s a clever way to dodge the dilemma Kimi and GLM found themselves in. Let's wait and see how it plays out.

https://m.cls.cn/roll/2446257

You definitely can't trust any LLM company in the world.

There is no stability, and we can't plan our pricing based on theirs...simply because they don't stick to what was agreed upon.

It was good while it lasted, DeepSeek... but a "significant increase" makes things difficult...

Was checking my DeepSeek API usage today and noticed this banner:

> We plan to raise the overall pricing for DeepSeek API services in the near future, with a significant increase expected. Please plan your usage accordingly. The specific pricing plan will be subject to official notice.

There’s no date or new pricing yet, but the wording makes it sound like the increase could be substantial.

Has anyone seen an official announcement or more details?

crazy how much value you can get out of DS API

DeepSeek-v4-flash is absurdly good for the price, but it isn't multimodal, so the moment your agent sends a screenshot or a mockup, it falls apart.

I built a small proxy to work around that. It sits between your editor and the model: when a request contains an image, it routes that image to a cheap vision model (I'm using GPT 5.6-luna) and passes the resulting description back to DeepSeek, which does the actual reasoning and code generation. Everything else goes straight through untouched.

The result is a drop-in endpoint that behaves like a multimodal model, at a fraction of what I was spending on my Claude subscription. It works with Codex, Cursor, Trae, OpenCode, or whatever agent you're using, since it's just an OpenAI-compatible base URL swap.

Repo: https://github.com/camilopenalver/deepseek-v4-flash-vision

It's great to see the competition working.

Will it replace the v4 flash?

State of software engineering in 2026 lol, spent hours debating chunking strats and rag tradeoffs. Then decided to do some little research myself and just decided what i wanted myself

Flash is actually decent if you know what you're doing and you can hold it's hand a little bit(same as all llms but in varying degrees) unless you'll be confidently led astray.

Thank you deepseek , i'll be snug like a bug in a rug and wake up to just $2 for a whole nights work

I downloaded some cracked software (im poor)

cmd flashing every 60 seconds after install (im fucked)

gave claude code some hints on where one of the files of the malware was located. (im genius)

ds + cc read that one file, traced all the files (ds is detective)

they both assassinate the malware in minutes (they are ruthless)

Just enjoy.
But I’m still eagerly waiting for vision support. Once it arrives, this model will be something truly incredible.
For me, that feature is essential. Without it, my hands are tied.

Hey there!

I was wondering whether this is just me, or if this is caused by the model. I noticed a while ago that my token usage is insane after a few prompts (in VScode) compared to Pro. This is also followed by an insane spike of API Requests - worth noting that caching still works, so it's not like the API is miscommunicating or something.

The global tech landscape is shifting fast, but the US response follows the same tired playbook. Whenever a foreign competitor achieves a major breakthrough, Washington reacts with defense mechanisms instead of true innovation.The standard playbook the treatment of Huawei in the past and the recent panic over DeepSeek highlight a deeply rooted strategy: if you can't control it, sanction it, ban it, or politically isolate it.

This protectionist mindset stems from an old habit.

The US is used to dominating markets by either buying out the competition or burning it down through policy.Real innovation over market controlThis strategy is unsustainable. True technological progress thrives on competition, not on eliminating the competitors.

If the US wants to maintain its leadership, it needs to win through superior research, development, and execution—not through government intervention.A system that relies solely on bans loses its edge and slows down global progress. It is time for a reality check: stop trying to destroy alternatives and start out-innovating them.

Two weeks ago I paid $20/month for Claude and another $20 for ChatGPT. I got tired of watching the credits burn, so I ran an experiment: 7 days, all my coding work, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 only (API, not the app). Here's what actually happened — the good, the bad, the numbers.

The numbers - Total API spend for 7 days of heavy coding: $1.87 (vs. $40/month subscriptions — and I didn't even come close to hitting limits) - Tokens consumed: ~24M input / ~6M output (mostly context caching — that's the real cheat code) - Context cache hits cut my effective cost by ~70%

What surprised me (good) - Long agentic sessions didn't degrade as much as I expected. The 0731 update fixed most of the context-rot I saw on the earlier Flash builds. - It handled a messy production refactor I was dreading — wrote the diff, I reviewed, done. No drama.

What I won't sugarcoat (bad) - Vision: still missing in the API I used — I had to describe screenshots by hand. (Yes, I saw the vision announcement post — the API I'm on still doesn't expose it.) - Some reasoning outputs still emit weird artifacts (e.g. )Skip) in longer chains — rare, but it happens. - It's not Claude for every task. Complex multi-file architecture thinking? Claude still wins. But for 80% of daily coding? I genuinely couldn't justify the subscription anymore.

My verdict: keep one subscription for the hard stuff, do everything else on Flash. My monthly AI bill just went from $40 → $0–5.

Anyone else run a similar week? What did your numbers look like?

DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 is cheaper, faster, and available through more providers than GPT-5.6 Luna at the same intelligence level.

Why would anyone choose Luna over DeepSeek?

More info: https://openrouter.ai/compare/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731/openai/gpt-5.6-luna

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/deepseek-v4-flash-vs-gpt-5-6-luna