---
source: 'https://howaiworks.ai/blog/deepseek-v4-pro-price-reduction'
section: blog
title: DeepSeek Makes Its 75% V4-Pro Discount Permanent
description: >-
  DeepSeek's launch promo for V4-Pro was due to expire on May 31. Instead the
  company made it permanent, fixing the model at $0.435 and $0.87 per million
  tokens.
date: '2026-05-22'
lastUpdated: '2026-07-17'
author: HowAIWorks Team
tags:
  - AI
  - DeepSeek
  - deepseek-v4
  - api-pricing
  - large-language-model
readingTime: 3 minutes
newsSource: DeepSeek
breakingNews: false
isReviewed: false
---

# DeepSeek Makes Its 75% V4-Pro Discount Permanent

> DeepSeek's launch promo for V4-Pro was due to expire on May 31. Instead the company made it permanent, fixing the model at $0.435 and $0.87 per million tokens.

## Introduction

DeepSeek announced on **May 22, 2026** that the promotional pricing for its flagship **DeepSeek-V4-Pro** will not expire. The discount had been running since the model's April 24 launch and was scheduled to end on May 31; instead, the company posted that it was "making our discount permanent."

This is worth stating precisely, because it is easy to report as a price cut and it is not one. Nothing got cheaper on May 22. What changed is that a temporary rate became the standing rate — which matters more than a headline reduction, since teams can now build cost models on it.

## Detailed Pricing Breakdown

Per million tokens, from the [DeepSeek pricing page](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing):

- **Input (cache miss)**: **$0.435** — 75% below the $1.74 list price
- **Input (cache hit)**: **$0.003625** — roughly 120x cheaper than a miss
- **Output**: **$0.87** — 75% below the $3.48 list price

Both rates are down by the same 75%, despite the discount being widely reported as steeper on output than on input — $3.48 to $0.87 is exactly three-quarters, the same proportion as $1.74 to $0.435.

The cache-hit rate is the number that changes agent economics. A loop that replays a long system prompt or a repository snapshot pays almost nothing for the repeated context, so the effective cost of a multi-turn coding session sits far below the headline input price.

## How It Compares

Against the frontier models available at the time of publication, per million tokens:

| Model | Input | Output |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **DeepSeek-V4-Pro** | **$0.435** | **$0.87** |
| [Gemini 3.5](https://howaiworks.ai/models/gemini) | $1.50 | $9.00 |
| [GPT-5.5](https://howaiworks.ai/models/gpt) | $5.00 | $30.00 |

That is roughly 3 to 11 times cheaper on input and 10 to 34 times on output — a wider margin than the "several times cheaper" framing the comparison usually gets. Competitor pricing moves, so treat these as a May 2026 snapshot and check the vendors' current rate cards before modelling spend.

## What This Does Not Tell You

Price is the easy half of the comparison, and the announcement says nothing about the harder half.

- **No benchmark claim is being made here.** DeepSeek's own [V4 release](https://howaiworks.ai/blog/deepseek-v4-pro-flash-release) publishes evaluation numbers; a pricing announcement does not, and cost-per-token says nothing about how many tokens a model needs to finish your task. A cheaper model that reasons twice as long is not cheaper.
- **Permanent is a statement of intent, not a contract.** It removes an expiry date. It does not prevent repricing later.
- **Peak-hour pricing is a live question.** Reporting in June suggested DeepSeek was considering time-of-day rates for the V4 generation. None appears on the pricing page as of publication, but flat-rate assumptions are worth re-checking.

## Conclusion

The substance of the May 22 announcement is narrow — an expiry date was removed — but the effect is not. Frontier-adjacent intelligence at $0.435 and $0.87 per million tokens, with a cache hit costing a fraction of a cent, is now DeepSeek's standing offer rather than a countdown. For anyone building agent loops, where token spend compounds across tool calls and retries, a rate you can plan around is worth more than a rate that is merely low.

Whether V4-Pro is the right model for your workload is a separate question, and one the pricing page cannot answer. Measure it on your own tasks.

## Sources

- [DeepSeek on X](https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2057854261699195173) — the May 22 announcement making the discount permanent
- [DeepSeek API pricing](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing) — current rates, including cache-hit and cache-miss tiers
- [DeepSeek API changelog](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/updates) — the April 24 V4-Pro and V4-Flash launch entry

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What are the pricing details for DeepSeek-V4-Pro?

$0.435 per million input tokens on a cache miss, $0.003625 per million on a cache hit, and $0.87 per million output tokens. Both the input and output rates are 75% below the list prices DeepSeek published at the V4 launch.

### Did DeepSeek cut its prices in May 2026?

Not exactly. The rates had been in effect since the April 24 launch as a promotional discount due to expire on May 31. What DeepSeek announced on May 22 was that the discount would become permanent, so the prices stopped being temporary rather than dropping again.

### How much cheaper is DeepSeek-V4-Pro than frontier models?

Against GPT-5.5 at $5.00 and $30.00 per million tokens, V4-Pro is roughly 11 times cheaper on input and 34 times on output. Against Gemini 3.5 at $1.50 and $9.00, it is about 3 times cheaper on input and 10 times on output.

### Is the pricing available to all API users?

Yes. The rates apply to the official DeepSeek API for anyone calling the deepseek-v4-pro endpoint, with no tiering by volume.

---

Source: https://howaiworks.ai/blog/deepseek-v4-pro-price-reduction — HowAIWorks.ai