ai pricing2 articles
DeepSeek's 75% Price Cut Is Now Permanent. That's a 34x Gap on Output Tokens Versus GPT-5.5.
Deepseek has made its 75% price discount on its flagship model, Deepseek V4 Pro, permanent, with output tokens now priced at just $0.87 per million — roughly 34 times cheaper than GPT-5.5's $30 per million. While Deepseek V4 Pro lags behind top frontier models like GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7 in raw performance, the dramatic price gap makes it particularly attractive for token-heavy applications like agentic AI systems. However, raw token pricing doesn't tell the whole story, as token consumption per task also significantly affects real-world costs.
Gemini 3.5 Flash Is Faster and Smarter Than Its Predecessor — And Considerably More Expensive
Google has released Gemini 3.5 Flash, its fastest model in its intelligence class at over 280 output tokens per second, but it comes at 5.5 times the operating cost of its predecessor due to tripled token prices and significantly higher token consumption on agentic tasks. Despite strong improvements in agentic and multimodal benchmarks, the model notably underperforms competitors like GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 in coding, one of the most important use cases for agentic AI. The price hike mirrors a broader industry trend, with Anthropic and OpenAI also raising effective costs on newer models, signalling that AI pricing is increasingly driven by complex, multi-step task demands rather than simple per-token rates.