[chvid]

That is a very good question. It is open source / open weight - yet none of the third party providers, that also host Deepsek, seem to be able to match Deepseek itself on price.

My guess is that they do aggressive caching / some proprietary optimizations in their hosting setup that they haven't published. Maybe also running at loss to gain market share.

And judging from latency / network performance, I don't think what you access, when you access deepseek.com from Europe, is hosted in China.

[dchftcs]

It's clear to me they are subsidizing inference in exchange for market share, and doing it at this scale makes the most sense if their target is getting more user data. Note that this sort of pricing isn't far off from the equivalent token-based pricing of ChatGPT or Claude subscription plans, which are more clearly subsidized by the user's data.