DeepSeek built a Claude Code rival, then quadrupled its prices

https://media.thenextweb.com/2026/07/deepseek-funding-pause-viral-posts-liang-wenfeng.jpg

Start with the money, because it is the part every developer noticed. From 16 August, a million output tokens through DeepSeek-V4-Pro costs $3.96 at peak, up from $0.87.

V4-Flash goes from $0.28 to $1.32, Bloomberg reported. Off-peak rates are half the new peak, so $1.98 and $0.66.

Now hold those discount rates against last week’s full price. Off-peak V4-Pro costs $1.98 against an old peak of $0.87.

The new discount is more than double the old undiscounted price. A team that moves every workload to the quiet hours still pays over twice what it paid at lunchtime.

The company built a Claude Code rival first

The pricing makes more sense once you see what landed alongside it. On Thursday DeepSeek released a developer preview of DeepSeek Harness v0.1.

A harness is the scaffolding wrapped around a model that lets an agent do real work. It reads files, edits code, browses...

Copyright of this story solely belongs to thenextweb.com. To see the full text click HERE