DeepSeek to increase prices for AI services

Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek said on Thursday it planned to raise prices across its application programming interface services, potentially by a significant margin.

The announcement came less than a week after DeepSeek began public testing of the official API version of DeepSeek-V4-Flash on July 31.

Industry experts said that the announced price increase also suggests that DeepSeek is close to launching the official version of V4-Pro, which is expected to increase overall computing demand.

"DeepSeek plans to adjust the overall pricing of its API services upward in the near future, with a relatively large increase expected," the company said in a note on Thursday. It urged customers to plan their usage accordingly, adding that the final pricing scheme would be announced separately.

The planned increase marks a shift for DeepSeek, whose aggressively priced models have helped drive down the cost of deploying artificial intelligence applications and intensified competition among Chinese model developers.

DeepSeek currently applies peak and off-peak pricing to its API services. Prices during peak periods — from 9 am to noon and 2 pm to 6 pm on weekdays in Beijing — are twice the standard rate.

Under its regular pricing, the V4-Flash model costs 1 yuan ($0.14) per million input tokens when the cache is not hit and 2 yuan per million output tokens. The more powerful V4-Pro costs 3 yuan per million uncached input tokens and 6 yuan per million output tokens.