DeepSeek announced it is making its DeepSeek-V4-Pro discount permanent. The reduced pricing — originally a time-boxed promo through May 31, 2026, 15:59 UTC — is now the standing rate for developers building on the model.
Permanent pricing is $0.435 per million input tokens, $0.87 per million output tokens, and $0.003625 per million cache-hit input tokens. The pre-discount sticker rates ($1.74 / $3.48) are no longer in effect. The pricing structurally undercuts major US frontier API providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Making the cut permanent shifts this from a promotional event to a strategic signal: DeepSeek is positioning API cost as a durable competitive moat, not a growth hack. With 750,000 chips and 140 trillion tokens processed, the economics of inference are tilting toward whoever can run cheapest at scale.