DeepSeek's AI model identified as cheapest among leading models, and the ripple effects are hitting markets

DeepSeek’s latest AI model is the cheapest to run among well-known models. The cost gap isn’t marginal.

The numbers that spooked Wall Street

DeepSeek’s R1 model, which launched in January 2025, operates at roughly $0.14 per million tokens. For context, OpenAI’s comparable offering was priced at $7.50 per million tokens at the time. That’s a 98% cost reduction.

The more recent V4-Pro model, which debuted in April 2026, comes in at $0.87 per million tokens for output and $0.435 for input. Those numbers represent a 34x reduction compared to leading rivals. The company has since locked in those prices permanently as of late May 2026.

Then there’s the V4-Flash variant, targeting budget-conscious workloads at around $0.14 per million tokens. That’s claimed to be 35x cheaper than GPT-5.5 alternatives. Third-party analyses have confirmed that DeepSeek models broadly run 20 to 50x cheaper than leading closed models.