I think any new model not demonstrably maybe 20-30% over Deepseek v4 capabilities priced over the price per token of Deepseek is almost automatically deprecated as low use model (maybe for Planning).
I think any new model not demonstrably maybe 20-30% over Deepseek v4 capabilities priced over the price per token of Deepseek is almost automatically deprecated as low use model (maybe for Planning).
DeepSeek v4 Pro is not actually that good a model compared to GLM 5.1 and Kimi K2.6. It's an okay coder/thinker for the price.
How so? In my experience trying these models using opencode Go, DeepSeek is superior to GLM 5.1.
If anything, DS4 has 1 million context window, while GLM 5.1 has 200K.
There are also benchmarks comparing the two: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/deepseek-v4...
Is Deepseek just eating cost or are people able to host their open models for comparable costs?
If openrouter is to be trusted, the cheapest offers that are not from Deepseek itself are:
- twice as expensive on the output (1.52 vs 0.87)
- six times as expensive on the input (0.33 vs 0.05)
https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro?sort=price#pr...
Other people are hosting it in the same order of magnitude. Xioami recently matched DeepSeek’s pricing.
These things enormously benefit from economies of scale. I am fairly certain their margins might be low but they don't actually sell API at loss, however that doesn't mean your cost footprint would be anywhere as low.
They focused on caching and other optimizations.
Likely CCP-subsidized