DeepSeek V4.1-Flash drops to $0.60/M output tokens as ARR tops $1B ahead of STAR Market IPO

DeepSeek V4.1-Flash launched September 10 as the smallest model in a new architecture family. It is now the centre of an aggressive pricing push. Off-peak output costs $0.60 per million tokens, roughly 70% cheaper than V4-Pro. The model is a 552-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts design with 8B active input and 16B active output parameters. That asymmetric encoder-decoder layout cuts KV cache memory to about 25% of a standard footprint, and the model scores 90.9% on GPQA Diamond.

The business numbers are the new fact:

- DeepSeek reports annualized revenue above $1 billion.

- It is preparing a listing on Shanghai's STAR Market, a notable shift for a lab long seen as a research-first offshoot of a hedge fund.

Its DSec paper also details sandbox infrastructure that sustains more than 380,000 concurrent sandboxes for agentic reinforcement-learning training. The work is timely in a week dominated by Western sandbox failures.

The competitive effect is already visible. Community benchmarks cite '$0.27 per benchmark task vs $1.99 for GPT-5.6 Sol,' and OpenRouter usage of the model reportedly rose 172% in a week. Some coverage claims it beats Opus 5 on certain benchmarks. Observers say the pricing directly pressures Western mid-tier offerings, including Anthropic's newly launched Sonnet 5.5, and it compounds Alibaba's voice API price cuts.

Caveats:

- Benchmark claims against Opus come from secondary coverage and need independent verification.

- Off-peak pricing applies only in certain hours, which limits the savings for latency-sensitive production workloads.

- Enterprises in regulated Western markets still face data-residency and geopolitical hurdles in adopting DeepSeek.

Watch the IPO filing for audited revenue, and watch for any Western price responses.