❯ DeepSeek Releases V4-Pro at One-Seventh the Price of Kimi K3

EXTREME PRICINGDeepSeek released its strongest model, V4-Pro, on August 13, with API pricing at $0.435 per million input tokens and $0.87 per million output tokens — versus $3 and $15 for Kimi K3, putting its input price at only about one-seventh of the rival’s. The new version is built around agentic capability upgrades: reasoning effort can be toggled across Low, High, and Max tiers, and it natively supports OpenAI’s Responses API, claiming one-click integration with Codex.

BENCHMARKSThe capability gap remains: per Artificial Analysis, V4-Pro scores 53 on the intelligence index versus 60 for Kimi K3, with the latter leading on several coding benchmarks. But on the firm’s per-task cost metric, V4-Pro is about 93% cheaper than K3 — K3 averages $0.84 per task, while V4-Pro costs just a few cents. Every previous DeepSeek generation courted developers with “good-enough performance, disruptive pricing,” but this generation’s price gap is the widest yet.

ANOTHER HANDAnother hand is at work behind the low price: per VentureBeat, V4-Pro’s launch came with API price adjustments, with cache-hit pricing rising more than tenfold during peak hours. For agentic applications that reuse context heavily, the actual bill may not be lower. Sticker prices down, cache prices up — DeepSeek is shifting its revenue structure toward heavy users.

RECALCULATIONThe low-price, volume-grabbing route hasn’t changed, but this time developers no longer calculate the sticker price — they have to calculate the real bill under their own call patterns. For agent teams with a high cache-hit ratio, the migration decision has only gotten more complicated: first re-run the past month’s call logs through the cache ratios to recalculate costs, then decide whether to stay or go.

▪ SIGNALList price cut to a tenth, cache prices up tenfold — DeepSeek has turned a price war into a price-structure war and shifted the full burden of price comparison onto developers.