Deepseek is starting a price war on the ai market

they just slashed input cache prices to 1/10th of what they already were. and there's a separate 75% off promo on v4-pro running until may 5th.

but even ignoring the sales – the normal api prices tell the story. output per 1M tokens (real weighted avg, no discounts):

- gpt-5.5: $30.21
- claude opus 4.7: $25.00
- deepseek v4-pro: $1.73

that's ~17x cheaper than gpt-5.5 and ~14x cheaper than opus 4.7.

now add the 75% promo: deepseek output drops to $0.87/M. that's 35x cheaper than gpt-5.5 and 29x cheaper than opus 4.7.

and the benchmarks? v4-pro isn't that far behind. artificial analysis intelligence index:

- gpt-5.5: 60
- claude opus 4.7: 57
- deepseek v4-pro: 52

13% lower score. 35x lower price.

after releasing v4 on open weights (mit license, free to self-host), deepseek is now aggressively competing on cloud api pricing too. own both ends of the market.

it's a dangerous game. when a model is 87% as capable at 6% of the cost, "we're better" stops being a pitch

ai is starting to commodify. the price war has begun