Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | petercooper's commentslogin

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.


The problem with DS Flash/Pro is that they are extreme reasoning heavy and step heavy. Step = cache hit. Reasoning = output hit. So the impact on those price increases will be felt much stronger.

I think that Flash is still a usable model but Pro is DOA... Even before the price difference between Flash and Pro, vs the intelligence / problem solving / tool calling did not make sense. But now that gap has widen even more. And there are just too many competitors models now close to that Pro price range.

Especially when we compare that competitive models offer subscription services that easily cut down the token price by 1:10. That makes Pro especially a bad value.

We shall see what the 3th party market is going to do, but i suspect that prices will be increased. If the argument was that DeepSeek increases price as they lack capacity, a company with access to billions, other 3th party providers that need to rent and have less optimized infrastructures will increase prices. Especially if they get hit hard with people moving around.

Its like we always see the same issue with popular models.

* GLM 5.2 is good, capacity issues, API price up, subscription heavy nerfs. * Kimi K3 is good, capacity issues, API price up, subscription heavy nerfs. * DeepSeek V4 GA is good, capacity issues, API price up * OpenAI GLM 5m, 10m active users. Subscription usage is sneakily tightened more and more. * Anthropic Opus too popular, ...

That is the main issue. The AI users are people who actively easily move between companies. Pushing peak loads to each unprepared company, releasing load on the "less desired". And round we go ...


I haven’t noticed the Deepseek models being especially verbose. They’re also so cheap to run it doesn’t matter. These pricing changes are inconsequential since even 100 * ~0 is still a low number.

"quietly" is the biggest AI writing tell of Q3 2026.

Not to take away from the broader point, but modafinil is lumped in with methylphenidate as a stimulant that "increase[s] the activity of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine". Modafinil does also stimulate the orexin system and is part of why it's so effective for wakefulness and not as a stimulant in the medium/long-term.

No, it’s a licensed black cab thing. London has had mini cabs as well for many decades who didn’t need to study anything and were not even licensed till about 20 years ago. However, their downside is they have to be prebooked and can not be hailed on the street. Apps count as booking and not hailing I guess.

Hopefully this boils down to the smaller versions they've teased. In my experience, Qwen models are the closest to the "less knowledge, more intelligence" (yes, the two are hugely correlated!) ideal some tool-dependent tasks need. Even the 3.5 2B can be easily prompted to always lean on tools and not jump to false conclusions (although its actual coding skills are abysmal, as you'd expect).

> less knowledge, more intelligence

People produce such models by over-RL-ing smaller models on math and coding tasks. I've found the results capable of neither innovative work nor thinking outside the box. They're straight-A students raised by tiger moments who never let them play freely for hours in the dirt.

Perhaps you could say such models are skilled --- but intelligent? Not by my measure.

People and AIs alike need diversity of experience and a broad liberal arts education to see hidden connections between fields and make real advances.


It's amusing to me that AI has become sophisticated enough that people have started being racist to it.

I agree with you to an extent, but you have certainly given me food for thought.

Sticking to LLMs, they seemingly get their intelligence (whatever that really means) from building models rich with knowledge, so you could have a point. But Qwen models seem to be particularly good, even at small model sizes, at maintaining both their own knowledge while acquiescing to and integrating external information in the moment.


I'm guessing this is almost entirely about the incredibly low cache read prices. Few have come close to them, nothing has a bigger effect on (a typical) session price, and with the price of RAM right now, they have to be the biggest pain point for them right now? A 10x increase in cache read would be a significant increase, yet would still keep them cheaper than every other provider of their model (at least based on the prices at https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro#providers)

I guess the low pricing was so DeepSeek could gather training material. The provider on OpenRouter indicates that data can be retained.

From the private conversation of deepseek CEO and the investors, I'm under impression that they take pride for the low API price though. So it is not only training data. If they really want the data there are many other ways to do so.

And confirmed: https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2087864589895798968

Pro's cache hit prices are 12x or 6x higher now depending on time of day.


Yes exactly this. Even a significantly higher price will mean they're way cheaper than rivals. I wouldn't make any changes until we see exactly what the price rises are.

I wanted to say luna's way cheaper now too, but oh my god I must have misremembered, DeepSeek cache read is 0.002, not 0.02.

Shopping with my kids I noticed we kinda have a replacement here in the UK in the shape of HMV (originally a spin off of His Master's Voice). When I was a kid it was mostly a record store, but now it's focused on what I'd call geek/"fandom" tat: posters, figurines, comics, band merch, etc. Whenever I'm dragged into one, it's always full of geek/fandom types hanging out.


Any free hosting solution tends to spiral towards abuse at some point.

Does it work? I'm a paid user, but set up a new free account to see if the deployment stuff worked there too (as I was linking to it from elsewhere) and it said I had to upgrade to a plan that supported it.


I bought one as it was on sale at the same price as the normal iPhone. Pretty good: 8/10. I have no interest in photos, don't need long battery life, and the lighter/thinner the better.

That said, I'd prefer something smaller but thicker with no protrusions/camera bump at all. I hate the wonkiness of all modern iPhones when sat on a table. I think the last totally flat one was the iPhone 5s!


I really want to try taking one and removing the camera/flash, to produce a bumpless (or at least bump-reduced) version. I'll probably wait for the price to come down some more first, though.


Not a “road” as such, but it’s also quite common in multi storey car parks as well where a ramp is shared by traffic going both up and down to stop unnecessary crossovers at each level.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: