Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tokioyoyo 17 days ago
Can you please link me DeepSeekV4 provider that's cheaper than their official offering? And not all tasks require low latency.

Also, there are a lot of competition in China. Like a lot. You might know better than me as well, but although the biggest AI-labs are based in USA, the adoption is weirdly global. Like as a general sense of what's going on - you can see AI-related ads literally everywhere in Tokyo, almost all the time, in every single screen in public.
2 comments
_matthew_ 17 days ago
Cro.ai seems to be: https://crof.ai/

Of course though they are not necessarily a viable solution for companies with security requirements etc. given it is just a single person project, but they still serve as a proof it can be done.

link
dakolli 17 days ago
This costs more.
link
gpugreg 16 days ago
Not as far as I can tell. Are we seeing different things?

For deepseek-v4-pro:

- $0.350 in, $0.003000 cache, $0.80 out https://crof.ai/pricing

- $0.435 in, $0.003625 cache, $0.87 out https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing

link
dakolli 17 days ago
Deepseek's api platform for V4 Pro is the only example of this, and Deepseek V4 Flash is cheaper (usually) than from Deepseek itself on openrouter via DeepInfra.

Deepseek shot themselves in the foot because they never intended to serve V4 Pro for .80c mm ouput, that was a promotional price that was meant to expire (and still might). They intended for v4 to cost $4.00 per million but Western inference providers drove down the price because they can operate at negative margins to try and push competition out. I can assure you they are losing a ton of money @ ~80cents.

My point is, its Western inference providers that are establishing the floor price of inference. They are willing to operate at a loss in order to put their competition out of business. Chinese providers are typically at or above the prices set by American/western providers if you go looking on the Chinese internet. You aren't going to get deals from China for inference except through this one instance with Deepseek v4 Pro which wasn't even supposed to be permanent pricing.

link