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Deepseek topped Ramp's trending software vendors in June 2026 as US companies chase cheaper AI
Deepseek led Ramp's fastest-growing software vendors in June 2026. The category tracks breakout growth relative to size.
Ramp chief economist Ara Kharazian says US companies are paying Deepseek directly and sending data through its platform, so this isn't about the benefits of self-hosted open-source usage. Kharazian warns about security and competitive risks of using Chinese models directly and doubts the trend will last.
Deepseek launched Deepseek V4 at the end of April. It doesn't match the best Western models in total performance but costs a fraction of the price. The performance gap certainly is far smaller than the price gap.
Deepseek had a brief hype cycle in January 2025, hitting 0.3 percent adoption among US companies per the Ramp AI Index, then quickly falling to 0.1 percent. The data covers real transactions from over 50,000 companies.
Overall, Western AI labs still lead by a wide margin, but Deepseek's breakout May fits a bigger pattern in which Chinese models are gaining popularity because of their price-performance ratio. A December 2025 report showed Chinese models like Deepseek and Alibaba's Qwen passed US rivals in Hugging Face downloads for the first time, accounting for over 44 percent of all downloads of popular new models.
Signs of a token economy taking shape
Kharazian sees cost awareness as the likely driver behind Deepseek's strong June. Inference platforms like Fireworks AI, fal AI, and DeepInfra are growing too, as companies use them to run open-source models instead of paying OpenAI or Anthropic.
These are early signs of a token economy: Companies might pick models increasingly based on price-to-performance. There's been debate about AI's return on investment lately, which many companies struggle to measure. Meanwhile, model prices have climbed across all providers, and it's clear that the age of heavily subsidized flat rates is nearing its end.
One thing Ramp's data doesn't support: the "SaaSpocalypse," AI killing established software products. Design tools like Figma and Paper remain in demand despite the success of products like Anthropic's Claude, which recently got a design spinoff of its own, Ramp says.