Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
The DeepSeek V4-Pro economics that changed the self-host conversation As of 22 May 2026, DeepSeek made its post-promotional pricing permanent: $0.435 per million input tokens, $0.87 per million output tokens, and $0.003625 per million cache-hit input tokens. Set against the closed frontier APIs — which still sit in the $3 to $15 per million range — V4-Pro is, on paper, between 5× and 30× cheaper at the wire. And because the weights are open, you also have the option not to use DeepSeek's API at all. That second option is what this piece is about. The managed API price is so low that the self-host conversation has flipped on its head. A year ago, "should we run our own LLM" was usually a sovereignty question with cost as a secondary tailwind. With V4-Pro it is the inverse: cost is now the…
