DeepSeek API price hike

DeepSeek announced its API prices will rise 'significantly' from current rates of 14 cents/28 cents per 1M input/output tokens, and told users to plan accordingly. The increase follows the release of DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731, an open-source model that nearly matches Anthropic's Opus 4.8 in capabilities at a fraction of the cost. The model became the fastest-growing ever by token usage on Ollama, prompting Ollama to expand capacity across the US and Europe. The price hike comes as Meta's Muse Spark and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna now match DeepSeek on both capability and price. Among open-weight models, DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 ranks second, behind Moonshot AI's Kimi K3. DeepSeek also resumed its $8 billion funding round, previously paused after a CEO comment leak, at a $74 billion valuation.