DeepSeek sets July 24 deprecation for legacy API model names ahead of V4 launch

The concrete new deadline: legacy model names deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner stop working after July 24, 2026 at 15:59 UTC, forcing migration to deepseek-v4-flash ($0.14 input / $0.28 output per 1M tokens) or deepseek-v4-pro ($0.435/$0.87). Both V4 tiers ship 1M-token context windows and expose an Anthropic-format API endpoint, enabling near-seamless routing from Claude Code — a pointed compatibility play to poach Claude developers on cost.

DeepSeek V4's full release is set for mid-July, building on its preview with stronger agentic task execution, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. The accompanying pricing change introduces peak (9am-12pm and 2pm-6pm) rates at twice the off-peak level.

The community response was pragmatic on the migration (a mostly one-line swap) but frustrated on economics: the expired 75% Pro discount is a cost surprise, and hardcoded model names in CI/CD pipelines make the July 24 cutoff a real operational risk. On r/DeepSeek, the peak-pricing plan drew pushback (184 upvotes, plus a popular 'how to mostly dodge it' guide at 268 upvotes), with users questioning cheap-model economics. Competitively, DeepSeek's Anthropic-format endpoint and 1M-token context directly target the same agentic-coding buyers Sonnet 5 and GPT-5.6 court, at a fraction of the price. Watch whether the July 24 deadline causes visible outages for teams with hardcoded names.