DeepSeek V4

Overview

Freshness note: Model capabilities, limits, and pricing can change quickly. This profile is a point-in-time snapshot last verified on June 8, 2026.

DeepSeek V4 is the V-series successor that DeepSeek began rolling out on April 24, 2026. It is the line replacing older deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner aliases, both of which DeepSeek has scheduled for deprecation on July 24, 2026 at 15:59 UTC. V4 is sold as DeepSeek’s main long-context production family rather than a research preview, and the API exposes two distinct variants under it: DeepSeek V4 Pro for harder reasoning workloads and DeepSeek V4 Flash for cheaper, throughput-oriented routes.

This entry covers the V4 generation as a whole. Reach for it when the product question is “should we adopt the new DeepSeek V4 line?” rather than detailed differences between Pro and Flash.

Capabilities

DeepSeek’s public materials emphasize a few characteristics that distinguish V4 from the earlier R1 line:

• Native 1M-token context window across both Pro and Flash variants, designed for long-context retrieval and analysis without separate “long-context” SKUs.
• Thinking mode is on by default, with a non-thinking mode available for latency-sensitive routes.
• Strong reasoning, math, and coding behavior, with V4-Pro positioned as competitive against current proprietary frontier reference points on standard benchmarks.
• Continued open-weight availability, retaining DeepSeek’s pattern of pairing a hosted API with releases on Hugging Face for self-hosted deployment.

Operationally, V4 sits alongside the DeepSeek-R1 family rather than on top of it. Teams already running R1 for reasoning-specific workloads can keep that route while migrating chat and assistant traffic to V4.

Technical Details

Official anchors at this snapshot:

• 1M token context window on both deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-pro.
• 384K max output tokens.
• Two API model IDs: deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-pro.
• Thinking mode by default, with a non-thinking mode toggle.
• OpenAI Chat Completions and Anthropic-compatible API formats.

Open-weight releases of the V4 family are published on DeepSeek’s Hugging Face organization under DeepSeek’s standard license, which keeps self-hosted, private, and air-gapped deployments viable for teams that need them.

Pricing & Access

Current official API pricing (per 1M tokens):

• deepseek-v4-flash input cache miss: $0.14
• deepseek-v4-flash input cache hit: $0.0028
• deepseek-v4-flash output: $0.28
• deepseek-v4-pro input cache miss: $0.435
• deepseek-v4-pro input cache hit: $0.003625
• deepseek-v4-pro output: $0.87

Earlier V4 Pro notes in this site used regular-rate launch framing around a temporary discount window. DeepSeek’s current pricing page now lists the lower V4 Pro rates directly, so production estimates should use the live pricing page rather than the old May 2026 launch-discount language.

Access options:

• DeepSeek API (deepseek-v4-flash, deepseek-v4-pro)
• Open-weight downloads on Hugging Face
• Third-party inference hosts and gateways that support DeepSeek models

Best Use Cases

Choose DeepSeek V4 for:

• Long-context retrieval, summarization, and analysis where a 1M-token window simplifies the retrieval architecture.
• Cost-sensitive production assistants that still need solid reasoning behavior.
• Open-weight deployments where regulatory, privacy, or sovereignty requirements rule out US-hosted closed APIs.
• Teams already using earlier DeepSeek lines that need a planned migration target before deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner are deprecated in July 2026.

V4 is less of a fit when frontier-only intelligence is the primary requirement, when official enterprise support contracts and data residency commitments are mandatory, or when the workflow is built around tool-use ecosystems specific to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google.

Comparisons

• DeepSeek-R1 (DeepSeek): Reasoning-specialized line that remains available alongside V4 for analytical workloads.
• Claude Opus 4.7 (Anthropic): Premium frontier alternative with stronger enterprise distribution and governance, at materially higher cost.
• GPT-5.5 (OpenAI): Closed-source generalist flagship with broader product surfaces, while V4 leads on price and self-hostable open weights.