DeepSeek in 2026: V4-Pro and V4-Flash Reviewed After the Price Hike
20 min read
DeepSeek (often misspelled “Deep Seek”) is a Chinese AI startup that took two years to become one of the industry’s front-runners. It shipped V4 in April 2026. On 13 August V4-Pro came out of beta, and on 16 August the company rewrote its pricing.
The previous version of this review called DeepSeek the budget flagship and promised prices 10–50 times below the competition. The first claim still holds. The second needs redoing: DeepSeek raised its rates, introduced peak-hour windows, and pushed the price of a cache hit up by as much as 1,100% over the first preview pricing. The company frames this as becoming a sustainable compute provider. Whatever the reason, a budget built on spring prices no longer adds up.
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