DeepSeek Locks In V4 Pro's 75% Price Cut as Permanent — $0.87/M Output From June 1
DeepSeek has quietly confirmed in its official API documentation that the 75% promotional price cut applied to V4 Pro is not a temporary discount — it becomes the permanent rate when the promotion window closes on May 31, 2026 at 15:59 UTC.
The official API docs state: “The deepseek-v4-pro model API pricing will be officially adjusted to 1/4 of the original price after the 75% discount promotion ends on 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC.” That means the promotional and permanent prices are identical: the discount absorbs into the list price.
What the Numbers Look Like
| Model | Input (cache miss) | Output | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4 Pro (permanent from June 1) | $0.435/M | $0.87/M | 1M |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | $0.14/M | $0.28/M | 1M |
| GPT-5.5 | $5/M | $30/M | 128K |
| Claude Opus 4.7 | $15/M | $75/M | 200K |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview | $1.25/M | $5/M | 1M |
At $0.87/M output, V4 Pro sits 34x below GPT-5.5 and 86x below Opus 4.7. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview is the closest frontier comparison at $5/M output — still nearly 6x more expensive.
Cache hit pricing was separately cut to one-tenth of the original rate on April 26 and remains in effect: $0.0145/M input (cache hit) vs $0.435/M (cache miss), and $0.003625/M for cache hits on Pro.
Performance Context
This is not a cheap model with cheap capability. V4 Pro launched April 24, 2026 as an open-weight 1.6T parameter MoE with 49B active parameters and a genuine 1M context window. On the MRCR benchmark at 1M context, V4 Pro posts 83.5% recall — above GPT-5.5 (74%) and well above Opus 4.7 (32%) at that length.
SWE-bench Verified puts V4 Pro at 80.6%, matching Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview and near the frontier ceiling.
The API is also Anthropic-format compatible. Migrating requires changing one URL and one model string in any Anthropic SDK — no rewrite, no new tooling.
Why This Matters
The V4 Flash model has always been the cost-optimised tier at $0.28/M output. V4 Pro now sits at a price point that was, six months ago, mid-tier territory. The gap between frontier capability and budget deployment is collapsing.
For developers running agentic workloads at scale, the calculus is shifting: a 1M context model with strong agentic performance at under $1/M output is a different category of tool than it was at $3.48/M. DeepSeek is making V4 Pro the default serious-but-affordable option rather than the budget-compromise one.
The permanent pricing announcement also arrives as DeepSeek closes its first external funding round — reportedly approaching $10B — meaning price cuts are now underpinned by fresh external capital rather than solely founder subsidy.