In February 2025, DeepSeek announced a price increase for its popular DeepSeek-V3 model, which again attracted widespread attention. This action reflects the cost pressure faced by the company in its rapid growth, and also reveals the fact that market competition and the demand from users continue to rise. With the popularization and development of AI technology, users have increasingly higher requirements for service quality and performance, and price adjustment seems to have become an inevitable choice.
Since its release in December 2024, the DeepSeek-V3 model has attracted a large number of developers and enterprises. The company's API service has implemented a 45-day preferential price experience in the initial stage. This model was launched with a training cost of US$5.58 million, which is not only much cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-4, but also demonstrates cost-effective performance through the subsequent inference model DeepSeekR1. However, with the end of the promotion period, the price of DeepSeek-V3 increased from 0.1 yuan to 2 yuan per million input tokens, and from 2 yuan to 8 yuan per million output tokens. This change surprised many users, and also gave rise to different opinions: Some netizens believe that with the increase in the number of users, the price adjustment is reasonable.
On February 8th, Tencent Cloud also announced the launch of DeepSeek-R1 and V3 original model API interfaces. At the same time, Tencent Cloud's large model knowledge application development platform Knowledge Engine has also accessed these two models, and is the first to support online search. Combined with knowledge base and RAG capabilities, developers can use this platform to build Internet applications based on DeepSeek large models in minutes. Tencent Cloud has become the first cloud vendor in China to support DeepSeek API+ Internet search.
On February 9th, Alibaba Cloud announced that six full-size models including DeepSeek-V3, DeepSeek-R1, and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B were fully launched on the Bailian platform. You can enjoy up to 2 million tokens for 1 yuan. From now on, all users can use them directly.
It is worth noting that while DeepSeek strives to improve service quality, it also faces higher operating costs, especially in terms of server resources and computing power. With the surge in users, DeepSeek's API service frequently displays "server busy" prompts. Therefore, price adjustment may also be a last resort choice for the company to increase server configuration and improve service stability. In this regard, DeepSeek pointed out in its official statement that the price increase is to "provide better and more stable services and continue to invest in research and development."
The popularity of DeepSeek has affected the domain name market. When a user enters ai.com, the domain name directly points to the DeepSeek official website. This is the first time that ai.com has been taken over by a Chinese manufacturer, reflecting DeepSeek’s significant influence in the international AI field. At the same time, this phenomenon has also brought huge traffic. Through the official website alone, DeepSeek's daily visits have exceeded Google's Gemini and Character.AI. Despite this, problems of service lags and response timeouts still plague users. How to ensure service quality in high concurrent access has obviously become the direction of DeepSeek's future efforts.
Faced with the price increase of DeepSeek, many users began to explore other alternative AI service platforms, especially in terms of API services and smart assistants. Mobile tools such as Huawei Xiaoyi Assistant and Honor YOYO Assistant, as well as web-side services such as Meta AI and National Supercomputing Internet Platform, are all alternatives that users can choose. This not only provides users with more choices, but also reflects the diversified characteristics of market competition.
The price increase and transparency of DeepSeek's endurance issue provide a space for users using AI tools to think. While enjoying high-quality services, always pay attention to the technical support and company development behind it, which has become a point that users cannot ignore when using AI tools. In the future, with the further development and popularization of AI technology, market competition will only become more intense, and user experience and technological innovation will be challenges that AI companies must catch up with. It is hoped that DeepSeek can overcome various difficulties and bring users a smoother and more efficient experience while ensuring service quality.
