---
title: "DeepSeek V4—almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/deepseek-v4-almost-on-the-frontier-a-fraction-of-the-price-xfglgl9rp
source_url: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/24/deepseek-v4
type: article
source: "Simon Willison"
published: 2026-04-24T06:05:42.477Z
updated: 2026-04-24T06:06:06.456Z
tags: ["llm", "deepseek", "mixture-of-experts"]
reading_time: 4
upvotes: 7
comments: 0
language: en
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# DeepSeek V4—almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price

**[Simon Willison](https://daily.dev/sources/simonwillison)** · 4 min read · 7 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

DeepSeek has released two preview models in their V4 series: DeepSeek-V4-Pro (1.6T total parameters, 49B active) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash (284B total, 13B active), both with 1M token context windows and MIT licensing. The standout feature is pricing — V4-Flash at $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens is the cheapest small model available, undercutting GPT-5.4 Nano, while V4-Pro at $1.74/$3.48 is the cheapest large frontier model. Efficiency gains from the architecture explain the low cost: V4-Pro uses only 27% of the FLOPs and 10% of the KV cache compared to V3.2 at 1M-token context. DeepSeek's own benchmarks show V4-Pro competitive with frontier models but trailing GPT-5.4 and Gemini-3.1-Pro by roughly 3–6 months. Both models are available on Hugging Face, with quantized versions from Unsloth expected soon.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/24/deepseek-v4>

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---

Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#deepseek](https://daily.dev/tags/deepseek), [#mixture-of-experts](https://daily.dev/tags/mixture-of-experts)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/deepseek-v4-almost-on-the-frontier-a-fraction-of-the-price-xfglgl9rp)