DeepSeek-V4 Release: Open Source & Pricing

The V4-Pro is reported to be better optimized for Asian nation's domestic chips, which is a significant advantage for enterprises in China and potentially elsewhere. This hardware optimization reduces latency and energy consumption during inference. The model's ability to handle long-context tasks effectively is a major selling point for enterprise applications requiring document retrieval and analysis.

• Enhanced reasoning capabilities
• Optimized for domestic chips
• Rivals best closed-source models
• Improved over V3 model (Dec 2024)

API Pricing

The pricing strategy is arguably the most disruptive aspect of the release. DeepSeek offers ultra-aggressive rates, with the Flash model at $0.14/M input tokens (cache miss) and $0.028/M (cache hit). Output costs are set at $0.28/M for Flash. For the Pro model, input costs are $1.74/M (cache miss) and $0.145/M (cache hit), with output at $3.48/M. This pricing structure makes the Flash model approximately 7 times cheaper than Claude Opus 4.7, making it highly attractive for high-volume applications.

Cache hit pricing is a crucial feature for cost management in production environments. By caching previous responses, users can significantly reduce costs for repetitive queries. The pricing is designed to encourage adoption of the Flash model for general tasks while reserving the Pro model for complex, high-value reasoning tasks where the extra cost is justified by the quality of the output.

• Flash Input: $0.14/M, $0.028/M (cache)
• Flash Output: $0.28/M
• Pro Input: $1.74/M, $0.145/M (cache)
• Pro Output: $3.48/M
• Approx 7x cheaper than Claude Opus 4.7

Use Cases

Developers can utilize these models for a wide range of applications. The JSON output support and Tool Calls capabilities make them ideal for building complex agents and RAG systems. The 1M context window is particularly valuable for enterprise RAG scenarios where long documents need to be summarized or queried. The compatibility with OpenAI and Anthropic API formats ensures easy integration into existing workflows without significant refactoring.

For coding applications, the FIM Completion (Beta) and Chat Prefix Completion (Beta) features allow for advanced code generation and debugging workflows. The support for multimodal capabilities, while primarily text-focused in this release, opens doors for future integration with vision models. These features are best suited for autonomous agents that require tool interaction and long-term memory retention.

• Coding and Tool Calls
• Enterprise RAG
• Agent development
• Long-context document analysis
• Beta features: FIM and Chat Prefix Completion

Getting Started

Accessing the model is straightforward for developers. Weights are available on HuggingFace for open-source experimentation. For production, users can access the API endpoints at https://api.deepseek.com and https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic. SDKs are available to streamline integration, and the model supports Beta features like Chat Prefix Completion and FIM Completion. Documentation is provided to assist with API key management and rate limiting configuration.

To get started, developers should first register on the DeepSeek platform to obtain API keys. Once registered, the SDKs can be installed via npm or pip for Python environments. The HuggingFace repository provides the model weights for local deployment, allowing for full control over inference hardware. This dual availability ensures flexibility between cloud and on-premise deployments.

• API Endpoints: api.deepseek.com
• Weights on HuggingFace
• SDKs available for Python and Node.js
• Beta features: FIM and Chat Prefix Completion

API Pricing — Input: Flash: $0.14/M tokens | Pro: $1.74/M tokens / Output: Flash: $0.28/M tokens | Pro: $3.48/M tokens / Context: 1,000,000 tokens (1M)

Sources

LLM Arena Rankings — Top 3 Open Source

As of May 2026, DeepSeek V4 Pro ranks #3 among all open-source models on the LLM Arena (Chatbot Arena) Text Leaderboard, with an Arena score of 1,463 based on over 4,000 community votes. It ranks #24 overall, competing closely with proprietary models.

Key Arena Stats:

• Overall rank: #24 (out of 200+ models)
• Open-source rank: #3 worldwide
• Arena score: 1,463 (±9)
• Votes: 4,176 community evaluations
• Price: $0.43 / $0.87 per million tokens (best value)

DeepSeek V4 Pro offers the best price-to-performance ratio of any model in the Arena top 30. Try it free on Chat LLM.