DeepSeek officially announced API pricing is going up "significantly"

That the cheapest near-frontier model on the market, at roughly 3 cents a task, is about to cost a lot more.

It landed a week after DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 shipped. Currently it ranks 2nd among open-weight models, behind only Moonshot AI's 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3.

The rates today are 14 cents/28 cents per 1M input / output, about 105X cheaper per task than Claude Fable 5.

Then demand broke the arrangement.

The new checkpoint became the fastest growing model ever by token usage on Ollama, which is now adding capacity across the US and Europe.

Serving that much traffic at a price built to prove a point stops working once everyone concedes it.

But now, the timing of this price increase invites trouble, because Meta's Muse Spark and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna now match it on both capability and price.