DeepSeek Makes 75% Discount Permanent on V4 Pro API
What Happened
DeepSeek announced that its 75% promotional discount on the V4 Pro API is now permanent pricing — $0.435 per million input tokens and $0.87 per million output tokens. The new floor is roughly 8-10x cheaper than equivalent Claude or GPT pricing for comparable reasoning workloads.
My Take
This is a deliberate margin-strike at the Western frontier labs' enterprise business, and it works because DeepSeek doesn't need to fund a Trillion-dollar valuation. The strategic question for OpenAI and Anthropic isn't whether to match — they can't profitably — it's whether to bifurcate: keep frontier pricing on the top model, and release a stripped-down "good enough" tier to defend the low end. So far they've refused. Every quarter they wait, the OpenRouter usage numbers shift more.
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