China’s DeepSeek prices new V4 AI model at 97% below OpenAI’s GPT-5.5
DeepSeek’s move aims to attract more enterprise clients, developers and agent-based users, according to an academic
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DeepSeek has slashed prices on its artificial intelligence models, including its latest V4 which now costs 97 per cent less than OpenAI products, potentially triggering a price war in the highly competitive AI market.
DeepSeek said on Sunday that it would reduce prices for “input cache hits” – where previously processed context was reused – for application programming interface (API) users to one-tenth of the original level, bringing the minimum input cost down to about US$0.14 per million tokens.
DeepSeek said the cuts were effective immediately and would be permanent.
AdvertisementTo promote the new flagship model released on Friday, the company offered an additional 75 per cent discount on the V4-Pro model through May 5, it said in a separate announcement on Saturday. The V4 family currently consists of the Pro and Flash variants, with the V4-Pro positioned as the company’s most advanced offering to date.As a result, DeepSeek-V4-Pro is currently as cheap as US$0.0036 per million input tokens, a fraction of the cost of its American rivals. In comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 charges US$0.5 per million cached input tokens. Given that a conversation consists of input and output, and that input is typically three times longer than output, the cost per conversation on GPT-5.5 is 32 times that of DeepSeek-V4.
