DeepSeek’s move aims to attract more enterprise clients, developers and agent-based users, according to an academic
2-MIN READ2-MINMinxiao Changin ShenzhenPublished: 6:00am, 28 Apr 2026DeepSeek has slashed prices on its artificial intelligence models, including its latest V4 which now costs 97 per cent less than OpenAI products, potentially triggering a price war in the highly competitive AI market.
DeepSeek said on Sunday that it would reduce prices for “input cache hits” – where previously processed context was reused – for application programming interface (API) users to one-tenth of the original level, bringing the minimum input cost down to about US$0.14 per million tokens.
DeepSeek said the cuts were effective immediately and would be permanent.
As a result, DeepSeek-V4-Pro is currently as cheap as US$0.0036 per million input tokens, a fraction of the cost of its American rivals. In comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 charges US$0.5 per million cached input tokens. Given that a conversation consists of input and output, and that input is typically three times longer than output, the cost per conversation on GPT-5.5 is 32 times that of DeepSeek-V4.
