AI API Pricing, Verified — What DeepSeek & the Others Actually Charge

AI moves faster than the posts written about it. Everything here is built the same way: go to the source, save a dated snapshot, then publish — whether that is a rate, a spec, or a fix for an error you just hit. The short answer comes first; the reasoning follows for anyone who wants to check it. Where a partner is not the cheapest or the best fit, the page says so out loud — affiliate links and ads are both disclosed on every page they appear on.

44 articles · 6 topics · Every figure traceable to its source · Last verified 9 Oct 2026

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DeepSeekOfficial rates, the off-peak discount, and what the same model costs on OpenRouter and Novita.7ComparisonsModel and tool head-to-heads: what differs, what we measured, and who each one suits.5Guides & answersWhat things mean, how to start in minutes, and the errors everybody hits — the short answer first.13AI coding toolsField reports from building real projects with AI coding tools: what budget models actually ship.9Self-hostingRunning models on your own hardware: VRAM math, quantization trade-offs, and when local actually beats the API.4AI newsReleases, pricing changes and deprecation deadlines, reported the day they land, with sources and a dated caveat.6

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One from each kind of answer we publish — a number you can check, a thing you can build, and a first-hand account.

Cheapest DeepSeek V4 API — 4 Options ComparedDeepSeek V4 Flash costs $9–$77 a month depending on where you run it. We compared all four options — and why most price quotes you'll find are wrong.0DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs V4 Pro: We Checked the “Comprehensive Win” ClaimWe checked DeepSeek’s claim that V4.1 Flash beats V4 Pro across the board: 14 of 16 benchmarks go to Flash, but GPQA Diamond and HLE don’t. USD pricing inside.0DeepSeek V4 API Cost CalculatorCompare what DeepSeek V4 costs per month across OpenRouter, Novita AI and the official DeepSeek API, using your own token volume.0

Recently updated

• GLM-5.3 on Amazon Bedrock9 Oct 2026GLM-5.3 (753B MoE, 1M context, CyberGym 84.5) is now on Amazon Bedrock, gated to eligible enterprise customers via cross-Region inference only. Bedrock charges $1.68/$5.28 per million tokens on the Global profile — a flat 20% above Z.ai's direct $1.40/$4.40 — but the Flex service tier halves Standard to $0.84/$2.64, undercutting direct pricing for queue-tolerant batch workloads. Priority runs +75%. Full price table, the enterprise-gating fine print, and which channel fits which team.
• MiniMax M3.1-Flash-Preview Review9 Oct 2026MiniMax M3.1-Flash-Preview (428B MoE, 1M context, ~150 tok/s) launched September 27, 2026 with no pay-as-you-go API price. Two independent Chinese test rounds ran identical prompts against Claude Opus 5.5 and found the Flash model holds on frontend and creative coding. KingBench 3 says otherwise on hard coding: 66.25% vs Opus 5.5's 93.75%. Access runs through the M Plan subscription at $22/$55/$132 per month, first month 50% off through October 14, 2026. Pay-per-token on MiniMax still means M3 at $0.30/$1.20 per million tokens.
• The Flat-Rate Era of AI Coding Subscriptions Is Over8 Oct 2026Cursor's June 2025 credit pools, Copilot's June 1 2026 AI Credits (1,500–20,000 credits per month at ~$0.01 each), and Gemini's October 9 tier cut all point one way: heavy users now pay metered. The verified numbers, the counter-argument taken seriously, and what to measure before you renew.
• The Uncanny Valley Moved Into the Interview Room8 Oct 2026AI screens candidates for 700+ companies; 71% of candidates use AI on their resumes; nearly 4 in 10 have walked out of an AI interview. What candidates actually report, why 'uncanny valley' is the right frame, and what the fix looks like.
• Claude Haiku 5.5: Four Ways to Actually Pay Less8 Oct 2026Haiku 5.5's list price is the floor, not the bill. Claude Max and Team subscribers get $100-500/month in API credits (with three exclusions that matter), the Batch API cuts 50%, cache reads run at one-tenth of input price, and the 100K-token pricing cliff is avoidable with the right pipeline shape. The action list, with what each lever doesn't cover.
• Claude Haiku 5.5 Pricing: 90% Off Haiku 4.5, Two Catches8 Oct 2026Claude Haiku 5.5 (launched October 7, 2026) costs $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens for prompts up to 100K — 90% below Haiku 4.5, exactly level with GPT-6 Luna, and under DeepSeek V4.1 Flash list price. The fine print: prompts over 100K bill at 5x, and the new tokenizer bills ~30% more tokens for the same text. Plus Sonnet 5.5 cache reads halved and $100-500/month API credits for Max/Team subscribers.

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