DeepSeek V4-Pro-0813 hits GA with 1.6T-parameter MoE and 50-1,100% price hikes

DeepSeek exited months of preview to ship V4-Pro-0813 across app, web and API, and open-weighted it on Hugging Face under an MIT license. The 1.6-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model activates 49B parameters per token, supports a 1M-token context and up to 384K output tokens, and posts strong agentic-coding numbers — 87.9 on Terminal Bench 2.1 and 62.7 on DeepSWE, near Anthropic Opus-tier coding scores according to community benchmarks.

The headline for developers is pricing. DeepSeek is raising peak-hour API rates by anywhere from 50% to 1,100% effective August 16, with V4-Pro output climbing to $3.96 per million tokens. Off-peak tasks will be discounted by roughly half to nudge load shifting. Even after the hike, DeepSeek's per-token cost remains below major Western rivals, which analysts read as a deliberate margin play ahead of a rumored IPO — a striking reversal for a lab whose whole brand was rock-bottom pricing.

Reception was split. On a 869-point, 350-comment Hacker News thread developers praised near-parity with Anthropic's flagship at a fraction of the cost — one reported spending just $12.50 for 2 billion tokens at 50% cache-hit rates before the hike. But SCMP and Tech in Asia noted the model 'struggles on benchmarks, shines in cybersecurity,' reinforcing a broader 'niche wins, generalist gaps' pattern among Chinese labs. The arrival intensifies a crowded week of Chinese frontier releases alongside Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max, and sets up a test of whether DeepSeek can monetize without losing the price-sensitive base that made it famous.