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- Hacker News
- Does the API response include a "service tier" response to indicate whether you paid peak/off-peak for a given request? I like to compute cost for each request, and save it with my results.
- Opencode said they are working on matching the old prices using their own inference.
Right now, they give 4100 credits for Luna and 63 000 for Deepseek on their prepaid plan (both are 2x)
by f311a - I doubt they will match old cache read pricing- that’s most important in agentic coding.by pzo
- 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?
by Tharre - So OpenAI cut Luna's price by 5x, DeepSeek increased price by 5x!
If I'm reading the benchmarks right, they now went from being much cheaper than Luna (but twice as slow), to being roughly same price (but twice as slow).
So all else being equal, where I would previously have used DeepSeek, I can just use Luna, and get the same result twice as fast?
(Yeah I know benchmarks are mostly nonsense, but the ones measuring time are real, and it's the most precious resource.)
by andai - On the contrary; it seems Luna (max) is 2x as capable at 1/5 the cost: https://cognition.com/frontiercodeby nateb2022
- DeepSeek prices only increased by 3-5x if you look at peak pricing only (In California that's 6-9pm and 11pm-3am. So not even the typical workday).
Also if you're considering Luna, I assume you don't care about this but I think it's worth pointing out: a major advantage of DS is the ability to self-host or choose a different host. As a customer that gives you much more negotiating power and potential privacy guarantees.
by culi - This is somewhat funny when you realise the data centres are now going to start a process that looks very so slightly like daydreaming. Depending on the time of day they're going to be thinking about different things in a cyclic manner. They're going to be doing things like finishing a hard days work then kicking back to think about tricky math problems.by roenxi
- That’s what my KimiClaw has literally been doingby ssk42
- We'll have Dwarkesh's "datacenter full of geniuses" with 99% of the geniuses coding up CRUD apps, then the dusty GPU in the corner, with the "do not disturb" sign on it, pipes up "You're absolutely right! The answer is 42!".
- That’s an interesting thing to think about. Still, it’s important for us to remind ourselves that “looks very slightly like” is not the same as the real thing. The A in AI stands for artificial.
The summary of this paper describes my sentiment in better words than I have:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05868-8
It’s very easy for the average person to mistake linguistic ability and simulated problem solving for intelligence and sentience.
by Grombobulous - It's worth keeping in mind the model doesn't keep a running memory. Each time its instantiated, it begins from its release state - so from its perspective (if it had one) the current task would be the first stop after posttraining. Perhaps the only stop.
Though of course you're talking about data centers, and romanticizing them rather than the AI itself.
by squidbeak - I'm no expert in pricing economics but once peak/off-peak pricing arrives, it seems like tokens are going to be like electricity or long distance phone minutes where it just becomes a commodity/race to the bottom.by alexpotato
- > becomes a commodity/race to the bottom.
that's a good outcome - it means they're fungible, and easily available.
by chii - Yes. I focus on pricing software and I’m a bit baffled why frontier models are pushing tokens.
It’s a race to the bottom, and the bottom is unlimited use for a flat monthly rate.
Granular pricing (tokens, minutes, etc) is pretty anti-customer generates less revenue than customer value-based subscriptions (why SaaS is such a good business model)
- That's a hefty increase. Flash pricing during peak is now 1.32/M out, compared to the current 0.28/M, which in turn is a quite a bit above the cheapest provider at 0.16/M.
https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...
by poly2it - You don't mention the off-peak pricing which is half that. Most western workplaces will enjoy the cheaper prices.by squidbeak
- Ever since I started using flash, it has slowly crept up to be my default for everything. It is at the good enough state for a fraction of everything else that's out there.
- Have you compared it to Luna? I was using Flash for small tasks before, then switched to Luna when they dropped the price.
The benchmarks show that Luna is significantly faster, but I think those are very complex tasks for which you'd probably want a bigger model anyway. (e.g. Sol is much faster than Luna at the same tasks.)
So I'm wondering if there's any difference for smaller tasks, or if they're basically matched now.
by andai - As well as the headline in/out changes, people heavily using agentic coding tools will want to note the 6x (off peak) and 12x (peak) increase to cache hit pricing on Pro (since cache hit can easily make up 90%+ of input on long sessions).
DeepSeek was hugely underpricing cache hit pricing before and even after this increase they're still cheaper on that metric than every other provider I'm aware of, but it will put an end to those "I used 1 billion tokens and spent $4" reports.
by petercooper - 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 ...
by benjiro29 - According to their post:
gpt-5.6-luna: $0.20 / $1.20 / $0.02 / $0.25 (In / Out / Cache Read / Cache Write)(Input / Output / Cache Read, [$/M]) DeepSeek-V4-Flash: Prev: 0.14 / 0.28 / 0.0028 Off-Peak: 0.22 (1.6x) / 0.66 (2.4x) / 0.007 (2.5x) Peak: 0.44 (3.1x) / 1.32 (4.7x) / 0.014 (5.0x) DeepSeek-V4-Pro: Prev: 0.435 / 0.87 / 0.003625 Off-Peak: 0.66 (1.5x) / 1.98 (2.3x) / 0.022 (6.1x) Peak: 1.32 (3.0x) / 3.96 (4.6x) / 0.044 (12.1x)EDIT: formatting
EDIT2: giving up on the formatting :-/
by usagisushi - > EDIT: formatting
Keep at it, I believe in you.
- There is no relative/percentage increases noted (understandably). Just because i'm lazy: roughly how much more expensive is it to work with v4 flash and v4 pro through the API, compared to before the price increases? Is it 2x, 5x, 10x higher?by alkonaut
- About 2x-2.5x off-peak for Flash, 2x-4x I'd say for Pro (x6 on cache in, the biggest increase throughout the board). And twice as much in peak hours.by floppyd
- Someone made a comparison yesterday, including relative increases, and GPT-5.6 Luna, then later someone also added more OpenAI, Anthropic, K3 and GLM 5.2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286679
Already outdated though I think, as GLM 5.3 is latest now :)
- # Flash, off-peak
# Flash, peakcache-hit 2.5x cache-miss 1.57x out 2.36x
Edit: fixed the numbers and formattingcache-hit 5x cache-miss 3.14x out 4.71xby zupa-hu - Old DeepSeek Flash 0731 prices have been independently reproduced.[1] The issue is DeepSeek being inundated and not having capacity to serve the demand, hence the price increases to significantly dampen demand. Never mind international demand either--just think about the magnitude of Chinese domestic demand. Prices for anything related to AI or computing in general (mobile phones, cloud data centre hosting, etc) will continue to climb fast as demand for computer chips _far_ exceeds supply. DeepSeek doesn't have an option other than to just work away on improving their technology in the period of time before computer chips once again become a commodity. For example, DeepSeek's cache ratio for their models apparently leads to 1/2 GPU time requirement versus the second best provider.[2]by dhx
- Reproduced on the CUDA stack right?
Let's say DeepSeek is being forced to use the CANN stack, and the new pricing reflects the cost when 100% of inference is done with Huawei chips. Then, I suppose we can infer that:
* CANN stack is 1.5x~2.3x less efficient in compute
* CANN stack has 6x lower inter-connect capacity
> computer chips once again become a commodity
Ascend 950 is going for $7k to $9k with mediocre looking specs. $16k for RTX Pro 6000, $6k for RTX Pro 5000. This is not looking good.
by throwdbaaway - Interesting to see that peak hours are work hours in China, night in the US and Europe, and also morning in Europe. So Deepseek's customers are mostly domestic.by progval