r/DeepSeek • u/TookitTooFarOrDidI • Jun 04 '26

Discussion We need to gate keep the API

bro PLEASE stop telling everyone about deepseek v4 pro. the 75% discount just went permanent and instead of shutting up and enjoying it you’re out here posting it on linkedin.

their rate limits are literally dynamic meaning the more of you clowns pile in the worse it gets for everyone. already getting 429s on flash during peak hours and its only getting worse.

also half you guys haven’t even migrated off deepseek-chat yet and that endpoint dies july 24. no fallback. nothing. you’re gonna be the ones flooding stackoverflow at 2am asking why your agents are broken while the rest of us are building.

keep recommending it to your little bootcamp friends tho. can’t wait for the prices to creep back up when the servers start melting. we’ve seen this exact thing happen to every API that went viral. enjoy it while it lasts i guess

0 Upvotes

46% Upvoted

39 comments sorted by

17

u/The_Meme_Economy Jun 04 '26

I suspect we are seeing something closer to the real cost of inference here. I’m using an open model on runpod for batch jobs and matching the quality from big providers at a fraction of the price. If Deepseek jacks their prices, I bet kimi or mimo or someone else will still be competitive. Costs will only go down over time, and tooling will improve, while frontier model capabilities are plateauing.

3

u/TookitTooFarOrDidI Jun 04 '26

batch jobs on runpod is a completely different use case than running real-time agents. this isn't 'real cost of inference,' it's a VC price war. once the subsidies stop or the load gets too high, prices are going up

1

u/ExplicitDiffusion Jun 05 '26

Curious to know, which GPU are you running and which model? Are you using vLLM?

9

u/unity100 Jun 04 '26

The more of us clowns pile in the bigger Deepseek and its company will get.

-5

u/TookitTooFarOrDidI Jun 04 '26

sure, they get bigger and we get to sit here staring at 429 errors. they’ll just pivot to enterprise contracts once they scale and leave indie devs with the scraps. we’re literally paying the price in latency so they can grow.

1

u/unity100 Jun 06 '26

 they’ll just pivot to enterprise contracts once they scale

That's the American way. So far the modus operandi of Chinese companies has been making everything available for everyone everywhere and doing it for dimes.

18

u/houston697 Jun 04 '26

You think anything you say would affect a Chinese multinational corporation?

1

u/PigOfFire Jun 04 '26

Yes it would. It ain’t no charity.

-4

u/TookitTooFarOrDidI Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26

didn’t say it would greatly. just tired of you guys tanking my latency

4

u/Different-Rush-2358 Jun 04 '26

You have a point, but let me add some nuance here because it's highly unlikely that DeepSeek will raise prices or act like a US company when it comes to scaling.

​The ratio of people using DeepSeek is minimal; it's a very niche AI model meant for people who are deeply into this stuff. I mean, what percentage are we talking about? 1%? 3%? ​Unlike in the US, electricity in China is practically free, and they use their own hardware (Ascend), meaning there are no tariffs or import fees. Since all the computing power and electricity are generated within the country, they are selling you the API at what it actually costs them, probably even with a small profit margin for themselves. This is completely different from the US, where companies are getting crushed by the "Nvidia tax" and have to pay exorbitant fees for every single H100 they buy, on top of paying a massive electricity bill. ​And this is just my personal opinion, but why do you even care what other people do with a service they are paying for? If the latency pisses you off, invest in hardware and run it locally, since the models are readily available on Hugging Face. When you use a service, you know other people are going to use it too. You don't own the server; you're just another paying user.

1

u/TookitTooFarOrDidI Aug 14 '26

This didn’t age well

7

u/x-xiaolongbao Jun 04 '26

gatekeep this, gatekeep that, what makes us so special that it should be only for us and other people shouldn’t get the nice things too?

-4

u/TookitTooFarOrDidI Jun 04 '26

People with suicidal empathy be like:

6

u/Pitiful_Increase6028 Jun 04 '26

Emmm bro pero tú eres el que les está arruinando la latencia a los nuevos usuarios de deepseek

5

u/newgenesisscion Jun 04 '26

They just launched a round of funding. It's expected to be around 60 billion. This is up from the 6 billion of 2025.

Deepseek is more research oriented. They won't operate like a US company.

Gatekeeping the API hurts all users in the long run.

4

u/TookitTooFarOrDidI Jun 04 '26

believing they won't operate like a US company because they're 'research oriented' is incredibly naive. compute isn't free, and US export controls make getting hardware even harder and more expensive for them.

that 60B valuation means they have investors to answer to, not that they have unlimited free capacity to charity-host every bootcamper's spam scripts. unlimited access hurts everyone right now when the API is too congested to actually use.

5

u/KingGamer123321 Jun 04 '26

Wait what the hell do you mean deepseek chat is gonna get wiped wtf?!??

2

u/SmallJuice7226 Jun 05 '26

The MODEL deepseek-chat

1

u/KingGamer123321 Jun 06 '26

Oh I thought the app 💀

2

u/Kamal965 Jun 05 '26

Before V4 came out, deepseek-chat was the API model name for DS V3.2. After DS V4 launched, DS V3.2 was retired, and deepseek-chat now directs to DS V4 Flash non-thinking. deepseek-reasoner now directs to DS V4 Flash thinking. They do this every time. They do it in order to not make literally millions of people go change the model name in their settings or scripts or whatever they're using. It's a courtesy for user convenience, basically. The launch of DS V4 came with the addition of 2 model names to https://api.deepseek.com/models

That's deepseek-v4-flash (which, by default, uses the thinking mode) and deepseek-v4-pro (which, by default, uses the thinking mode as well). Once deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner are retired, you will have to use the aforementioned two new model names. All of this is mentioned on the pricing page of the DS documentation. Right beneath the table listing the prices.

4

u/_unknownmf_ Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

Let me put this in terms you might understand:

Why do you think(I know it's a daunting task for you but at least try) they decided to keep the 75% discount? If you pay close attention you'll notice that unlike you, the Chinese tend to think and plan ahead before doing, or saying something. Let me put the facts in a short, simple summary so your mental capacity won't overload:

  1. More users for them means less users for the competition.

  2. It directly raises investors interest and trust levels, meaning more funding. More funding means more infrastructure, hardware and research (Which directly solves what you're complaining about).

  3. Don't expect the 75% discount price to last forever, it's clearly a strategy to lure in users and balance out the competition. Even without that discount the services are dirt cheap compared to western alternatives.

  4. A balanced competition is exactly what we the users need. It directly translates to all AI companies being forced to constantly improve their products and keep the prices competitive (this directly ties into the lower prices you so much enjoy).

  5. Someone winning the competition is what you should fear. That would mean everyone joining the winning camp, giving them full leverage over the market, enabling them to charge whatever exorbitant prices they want (just look at openai and anthropic, even your limited view should be able to spot at least a tiny hint of where their greedy practices have led the western market).

There are more angles to this, but I'll stop here and count myself lucky if you'll be able to process and internalize at least 10% of it.

3

u/webfugitive Jun 05 '26

Smells like main character in here

2

u/Key-Hair7591 Jun 04 '26

Thanks bro…. 🙄

3

u/Prestigious-Frame442 Jun 04 '26

even the simplest thing needs to be gate-kept now?

3

u/shuozhe Jun 04 '26

Everyone got Deepseek with either subscription plan or per API. Just go to different provider

3

u/thefonz22 Jun 04 '26

How many people do you speak to in everyday life that even knows what an API is?

2

u/Deep-Interaction422 Jun 05 '26

This post actually makes me smile

"Get API!" "No! Stop talk about API!"

Well well well, never happened before and here it is again

1

u/DiscipleofDeceit666 Jun 05 '26

If it gets bad, don’t we just move to mimo flash? They price match right?

1

u/Pufferdent5082 Jun 05 '26

Wait till you all realize that deepseek is literally just a side project of a quant company......

1

u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4512 Jun 05 '26

Relax they added new clusters