DeepSeek ends promotional pricing amid surging popularity, secures AI.com redirect

Name: Trump: Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek’s strong showing a ‘wake-up call’ for US tech sector
Uploaded: 2025-02-10T12:00:15.000Z
Duration: 1 min 18 s
Description: Trump: Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek’s strong showing a ‘wake-up call’ for US tech sector

DeepSeek has raised the price of accessing its V3 model via API for the first time since it exploded in popularity last month

Reading Time:2 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

DeepSeek has raised the price of accessing its V3 model through its API, but it is still a fraction of what OpenAI charges for access to its GPT-4o. Photo: EPA-EFE

Ben Jiangin Beijing

Published: 8:00pm, 10 Feb 2025Updated: 8:18pm, 10 Feb 2025

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek announced on Sunday that it has discontinued promotional pricing for access to its V3 model via its application programming interface (API) due to a surge in demand, marking the first price increase for the model since it captured global attention.

The new pricing for DeepSeek-chat, powered by the V3 model, is set at US$0.27 per million token inputs and US$1.1 per million token outputs, marking significant increases from the previous rates of US$0.14 and US$0.27, respectively. In AI, a token is a fundamental unit of data that is processed by algorithms.

The price increase comes as DeepSeek’s profile has risen significantly over the past couple of weeks, as its cost-efficient-but-high-performance V3 and R1 models received global attention from the likes of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and even US President Donald Trump.

DeepSeek now appears to have received a nod of approval from the mystery owner of AI.com, a Kuala Lumpur-registered domain that is known for redirecting people to notable AI services.

It now forwards users to chat.deepseek.com, and previously redirected to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s X.ai when they were the talk of the industry.

01:18

Trump: Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek’s strong showing a ‘wake-up call’ for US tech sector

The end to discount pricing also came right after the company last week urgently suspended users from topping up their accounts for API use.