DeepSeek slashes fees for new AI model in Chinese price war

[BENGALURU] DeepSeek is aggressively pitching low-priced plans for its just-released flagship model, intensifying competition across a Chinese artificial intelligence industry trying to take on Silicon Valley’s best.

The Hangzhou-headquartered AI lab is offering a 75 per cent discount to developers using the DeepSeek-V4-Pro, released last week after months of anticipation. It’s also reducing fees for input cache hits across its family of AI platforms to a 10th of their original pricing, dramatically lowering costs for frequent users sending similar or repeated requests.

The move threatens to re-ignite a price-based war that erupted after DeepSeek up-ended the industry with the R1 last year. Its latest promotion comes at a time when OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and Alphabet’s Google are rapidly pushing new releases, but access to those can be expensive.

Chinese AI firms are discounting to incentivise users to switch, accelerating adoption in a crowded global AI field in an attempt to reshape the US-China AI race. DeepSeek is hoping pricing, accessibility and sophisticated features will differentiate its models for next-generation developers and enterprise users.

DeepSeek-V4’s context window, the maximum amount of data a model can consider at once, is significant as it enables the processing of complex code bases and long documents. The model allows easy integration of Claude Code, OpenClaw and OpenCode, making it easier to work within the broader AI ecosystem.

“The pricing, open source availability and one million context window features all lower barriers for developers, startups and small enterprises,” said Akshar Keremane, co-founder of Bangalore-based AI startup O-Health.

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