75%. That's the size of the discount DeepSeek is now making permanent on API access to its flagship model, according to a Bloomberg report.
This isn't a promotional rate anymore - it's the new price floor. For developers and businesses building on top of DeepSeek's API, that's a meaningful cost structure shift. The move cements what has been one of the defining competitive pressure points in AI infrastructure over the past year: Chinese model providers offering performance that approaches frontier models at a fraction of the price.
DeepSeek's pricing has already forced OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to reconsider what they charge. When DeepSeek-R1 launched in early 2025, it demonstrated that reasoning-capable models didn't require the kind of compute costs Western labs had been citing to justify their rates. A permanent 75% cut signals the company isn't planning to walk that back once attention fades - this is the business model. For anyone evaluating which model provider to build on, the calculus just shifted again.