So OpenAI cut Luna's price by 5x, DeepSeek increased price by 5x!
If I'm reading the benchmarks right, they now went from being much cheaper than Luna (but twice as slow), to being roughly same price (but twice as slow).
So all else being equal, where I would previously have used DeepSeek, I can just use Luna, and get the same result twice as fast?
(Yeah I know benchmarks are mostly nonsense, but the ones measuring time are real, and it's the most precious resource.)
dhx
Old DeepSeek Flash 0731 prices have been independently reproduced.[1] The issue is DeepSeek being inundated and not having capacity to serve the demand, hence the price increases to significantly dampen demand. Never mind international demand either--just think about the magnitude of Chinese domestic demand. Prices for anything related to AI or computing in general (mobile phones, cloud data centre hosting, etc) will continue to climb fast as demand for computer chips _far_ exceeds supply. DeepSeek doesn't have an option other than to just work away on improving their technology in the period of time before computer chips once again become a commodity. For example, DeepSeek's cache ratio for their models apparently leads to 1/2 GPU time requirement versus the second best provider.[2]
gpt-5.6-luna: $0.20 / $1.20 / $0.02 / $0.25 (In / Out / Cache Read / Cache Write)
EDIT: formatting
EDIT2: giving up on the formatting :-/
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petercooper
As well as the headline in/out changes, people heavily using agentic coding tools will want to note the 6x (off peak) and 12x (peak) increase to cache hit pricing on Pro (since cache hit can easily make up 90%+ of input on long sessions).
DeepSeek was hugely underpricing cache hit pricing before and even after this increase they're still cheaper on that metric than every other provider I'm aware of, but it will put an end to those "I used 1 billion tokens and spent $4" reports.
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ChildOfChaos
I pay for Google AI Pro (Bought a year in advance) and Gemini is so bad, I burned through 75% of my five hour allowance trying to get it to fix something.
I pasted the same prompt into OpenCode, set to Deepseek v4 flash free and did it first try.
I'm was going to purchase Opencode GO to try it, but seems my timing is really bad :( hope it doesn't go up too much in Opencode or they find other providers. Bad timing!
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f311a
Opencode said they are working on matching the old prices using their own inference.
Right now, they give 4100 credits for Luna and 63 000 for Deepseek on their prepaid plan (both are 2x)
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unified101
About 3x increase. Luna is now a much better deal. Hope they don't increase their prices in response.
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reddec
It doesn't make any sense unless they are going to exit from inference market. They will be literally one of the costliest option (by output, for flash) if use openrouter as source.
kortzeus
Makes sense, basically increased price for peak hours when they don't have enough infra to serve everyone. Can expect the return of prices back.
pu_pe
This now places deepseek flash v4 from DeepSeek themselves at higher prices than openrouter (depending on caching). Will be interesting to see if third party prices remain the same.
So OpenAI cut Luna's price by 5x, DeepSeek increased price by 5x!
If I'm reading the benchmarks right, they now went from being much cheaper than Luna (but twice as slow), to being roughly same price (but twice as slow).
So all else being equal, where I would previously have used DeepSeek, I can just use Luna, and get the same result twice as fast?
(Yeah I know benchmarks are mostly nonsense, but the ones measuring time are real, and it's the most precious resource.)
Old DeepSeek Flash 0731 prices have been independently reproduced.[1] The issue is DeepSeek being inundated and not having capacity to serve the demand, hence the price increases to significantly dampen demand. Never mind international demand either--just think about the magnitude of Chinese domestic demand. Prices for anything related to AI or computing in general (mobile phones, cloud data centre hosting, etc) will continue to climb fast as demand for computer chips _far_ exceeds supply. DeepSeek doesn't have an option other than to just work away on improving their technology in the period of time before computer chips once again become a commodity. For example, DeepSeek's cache ratio for their models apparently leads to 1/2 GPU time requirement versus the second best provider.[2]
[1] https://nitter.net/thdxr/status/2085377844515922210#m
[2] https://nitter.net/thdxr/status/2087610161636471289#m
According to their post:
gpt-5.6-luna: $0.20 / $1.20 / $0.02 / $0.25 (In / Out / Cache Read / Cache Write)EDIT: formatting
EDIT2: giving up on the formatting :-/
As well as the headline in/out changes, people heavily using agentic coding tools will want to note the 6x (off peak) and 12x (peak) increase to cache hit pricing on Pro (since cache hit can easily make up 90%+ of input on long sessions).
DeepSeek was hugely underpricing cache hit pricing before and even after this increase they're still cheaper on that metric than every other provider I'm aware of, but it will put an end to those "I used 1 billion tokens and spent $4" reports.
I pay for Google AI Pro (Bought a year in advance) and Gemini is so bad, I burned through 75% of my five hour allowance trying to get it to fix something.
I pasted the same prompt into OpenCode, set to Deepseek v4 flash free and did it first try.
I'm was going to purchase Opencode GO to try it, but seems my timing is really bad :( hope it doesn't go up too much in Opencode or they find other providers. Bad timing!
Opencode said they are working on matching the old prices using their own inference.
Right now, they give 4100 credits for Luna and 63 000 for Deepseek on their prepaid plan (both are 2x)
About 3x increase. Luna is now a much better deal. Hope they don't increase their prices in response.
It doesn't make any sense unless they are going to exit from inference market. They will be literally one of the costliest option (by output, for flash) if use openrouter as source.
Makes sense, basically increased price for peak hours when they don't have enough infra to serve everyone. Can expect the return of prices back.
This now places deepseek flash v4 from DeepSeek themselves at higher prices than openrouter (depending on caching). Will be interesting to see if third party prices remain the same.
non-x link: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/ (https://web.archive.org/web/20260813114752/https://api-docs....)
the neat thing about the models being open-weights is there's a dozen other providers on OpenRouter still at the old price, or lower
Ah well. I spend about $5/month with Deepseek, so now I’ll have to find room in my budget for $15. Might have to tip my barista less or something.
https://xcancel.com/deepseek_ai/status/2087864589895798968