Two pricing stories dropped this week that are worth a pause if you're building on LLM APIs.
DeepSeek V4 Flash exits preview — and undercuts its own flagship
DeepSeek V4 Flash left preview at $0.14 / $0.28 per million tokens (input/output) — and it's beating its own larger Pro model on agentic benchmarks, hitting 82.7% on Terminal-Bench. That's a smaller, cheaper model outperforming its own bigger sibling on agent tasks.
Claude Sonnet 5's introductory pricing ends September 1
Anthropic's introductory pricing for Claude Sonnet 5 ends September 1. The headline price rises from $2 to $3 per million tokens — but the bigger change is under the hood: a new tokenizer adds up to 35% more tokens for the same text. Combine the two and the real-world cost increase is closer to 2x, not 1.5x.
