DeepSeek Is Raising API Prices by Up to 1,100% Ahead of a Possible IPO (startupfortune.com)

DeepSeek is changing the cheap API story that made developers pay attention. The price gap with OpenAI and Anthropic is still there, but it no longer looks as effortless as it did a few months ago. DeepSeek's V4 pricing shift is a small table with a large message inside it. Tencent Cloud said in a June 29 notice that DeepSeek V4-Pro and V4-Flash would move to peak and off-peak billing around the V4 official release, with peak rates set for 09:00 to 12:00 and 14:00 to 18:00 Beijing time. During those windows, the listed rates double. That's not a footnote. It's the bill. For V4-Pro, Tencent's notice listed regular pricing at 0.025 yuan per million cache-hit input tokens, 3 yuan per million cache-miss input tokens, and 6 yuan per million output tokens. Peak pricing rises to 0.05 yuan, 6 yuan, and 12 yuan for the same three items. Double, across the board. For V4-Flash, regular output is 2 yuan per million tokens and peak output is 4 yuan. The company's own API pricing page still shows the U.S. dollar list price for V4-Pro output at $0.87 per million tokens and V4-Flash output at $0.28, with lower cache-hit input rates that...