DeepSeek warned developers Thursday of a significant price increase across its API services, an about-face for a company charging $0.14 per million input tokens. The Hangzhou-based company posted the notice on its developer platform, offering no figures, no percentages and no effective date for the change. It said only that overall pricing would rise in the near future, with detailed plans to be advised later. DeepSeek charges $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens for V4 Flash, rates that undercut most of the market by an order of magnitude. Moonshot AI asks $3 and $15 for the same volumes on Kimi K3, while Anthropic lists $10 and $50 for the same work on its Fable 5 service. The warning arrived a week after the release of V4-Flash-0731, a 284-billion-parameter model that activates roughly 13 billion parameters at a time. AI developer Michael Guo questioned the timing in a social media post on Thursday, arguing the company was inviting trouble by moving now. He noted that American labs have closed much of the gap DeepSeek once enjoyed on both cost and capability. Meta's Muse Spark and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna now compete directly for the same developer budgets. OpenRouter rankings put V4 Flash first for the week of Jul. 27 to Aug. 2, at 7.22 trillion tokens, and the coding platform