DeepSeek warns of a 'significant' API price increase ahead

DeepSeek’s api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing page added a second pricing footnote this week, distinct from its long-standing generic “prices may vary” disclaimer: “We plan to raise the overall pricing for DeepSeek API services in the near future, with a significant increase expected. Please plan your usage accordingly. The specific pricing plan will be subject to official notice.” No dollar amount, affected model, or effective date has been published — DeepSeek-V4-Flash ($0.14/$0.0028/$0.28 per 1M for cache-miss input / cache-hit input / output) and DeepSeek-V4-Pro ($0.435/$0.003625/$0.87) rates are unchanged in this capture.

The same page also quietly added a Responses API endpoint for DeepSeek-V4-Flash only (DeepSeek-V4-Pro support is slated for “early August 2026”), and the model build tag moved to DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731. The notice lands roughly a month after Bloomberg and Reuters reported DeepSeek preparing an IPO filing and a raise at a ~$74B valuation — DeepSeek’s per-token API rates have anchored the industry’s price floor since 2024, and this is the first explicit signal that floor may be moving up rather than down.