If openrouter is to be trusted, the cheapest offers that are not from Deepseek itself are:

- twice as expensive on the output (1.52 vs 0.87)

- six times as expensive on the input (0.33 vs 0.05)

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro?sort=price#pr...

Other people are hosting it in the same order of magnitude. Xioami recently matched DeepSeek’s pricing.

These things enormously benefit from economies of scale. I am fairly certain their margins might be low but they don't actually sell API at loss, however that doesn't mean your cost footprint would be anywhere as low.

They focused on caching and other optimizations.

Likely CCP-subsidized