Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek said on Thursday it planned to raise prices across its application programming interface services, potentially by a significant margin.
The announcement came less than a week after DeepSeek began public testing of the official API version of DeepSeek-V4-Flash on July 31.
Industry experts said that the announced price increase also suggests that DeepSeek is close to launching the official version of V4-Pro, which is expected to increase overall computing demand.
"DeepSeek plans to adjust the overall pricing of its API services upward in the near future, with a relatively large increase expected," the company said in a note on Thursday. It urged customers to plan their usage accordingly, adding that the final pricing scheme would be announced separately.
The planned increase marks a shift for DeepSeek, whose aggressively priced models have helped drive down the cost of deploying artificial intelligence applications and intensified competition among Chinese model developers.
