DeepSeek makes 75% V4-Pro price cut permanent, adds 90% cached-token discount

DeepSeek converted its month-old 'temporary' 75% V4-Pro API price reduction into a permanent tariff and layered a 90% discount on cached tokens on top. The company attributes the cuts to genuine efficiency gains in long-context inference — not loss-leader pricing — and is passing the savings directly to developers. At current rates, a million V4-Pro reasoning tokens costs roughly one-quarter of GPT-5.5 or Claude Opus 4.7 equivalents.

Mechanically, the cached-token discount targets the largest cost driver in agentic workloads: repeated system prompts and tool definitions that get sent on every turn. With 90% off cached tokens, agent loops that previously cost $0.10/run now cost closer to $0.02 — competitive with self-hosted open-weight setups but with frontier-class reasoning quality.

The community pulse on r/LocalLLaMA and Google's dev forum framed this as 'the Nvidia tax is real' — Chinese models running on Huawei Ascend hardware are now 'practically free' for production workloads compared to US-hosted frontier APIs. One Google dev forum thread argued this forces a structural response from OpenAI and Anthropic well before their summer releases.

The geopolitical caveat sharpened in parallel: r/LocalLLaMA's thread on 'China clamps down on overseas travel for AI talent at Alibaba, DeepSeek' (239 upvotes, 180 comments) suggests Beijing is treating these labs as strategic assets. For US enterprise buyers, that means cheap DeepSeek tokens come with a compliance overhead — data residency, export-control review, and the risk that the model gets sanctioned the way Huawei chips were.