this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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“Permanently” lol it’s a subscription and the terms say they can change the price at any time. How is it legal for them to advertise with the word “permanent”?
It's actually API access price, and it's charged per input + output tokens. $0.87 per million tokens is damn cheap.
They probably have super cheap electricity and it's possible they use cheap Chinese Ai chips for inference.
china is expanding energy tremendously to the point that the USA simply cannot compete. Even if data centers all get built tomorrow they will soon bottleneck because energy demands can’t be met in a timely manner. The median time to get a new power plant online is 5 years. Meanwhile china is investing heavily not only in expansion of their grid, but expansion into renewable energy. They’ve added 8x the power to their grid that the us did just in 2023 and if anything their pace has risen since then. Their renewable grid is 3x the size of the entire us grid
In terms of raw performance US firms were months ahead and that gap is shrinking. Dola-seed is ranked second behind opus by us firms with a gap of under 3% in benchmark performance
This performance gap closing and energy superiority is why ultimately DeepSeek v4 pro outperforms opus 4.6. Opus is the clear winner, but not by a very appreciable amount, and ranges from 11-26x more expensive. Chinas hardware isn’t more efficient but their energy superiority puts them way ahead; their cloudmatrix uses well over 100% more energy than nvidia g200 but their energy costs are sometimes as little as 1/8th American costs per kWh
The race to superiority here is ultimately does America substantially update and expand their grid before Chinas domestic chip manufacturing bridges the hardware gap that has been created by things like export controls? My money is on China here; Huawei, SMIC, etc have an engineering problem that is rapidly being addressed with gigantic state sponsorship (and frankly the major bottleneck is EUV lithography, which they are actively pursuing, though this is an issue that even with tens of billions will take many years to catch up to the west). While those barriers are real the American barriers are an extremely complex regulatory system (which is ultimately why trump is being directed to gut everything in terms of environmental and worker protections), funding (the oligarchs want this but not enough to part with their money, they want us to fund it), and unlike China the US drastically changes trajectory every 4-8 years.
I think it's meant to convey that it's not a temporary deal on the old price, but a permanent new price point.
What is the effective difference? It’s not like they’re offering long term contracts.
Likely more to do with communication to customers on sale pages and such, and consequently with customer protection laws. They likely can't advertise it as a discounted price for example in the same way a seasonal sale would be signposted, I would imagine at least.
60% of the time it works every time
Don’t use any of them much and from my limited experience they all seem to be pretty much the same. In fact DeepSeek probably has been a little better than ChatGPT.
As long as you don't mind them harvesting every tiny bit of data you feed it.
I don't like the big US players, but at least they're doing a tiny bit to keep out of your shit. Deepseek is not pretending at all. I suppose it's at least honest and the price point is REALLY tempting. Openclaw gets expensive fast with the number of tokens it consumes. I burned through $30 in two days with it using Claude Haiku/Sonnet. Plugging it into cheap LLM is a nice idea, but no thanks.
Really depends on your point of view. Personally I see the US AI push as a maximum harvest and it is hard to see the Chinese as being worse. The US has really gone flat out destroying whatever credibility and moral authority they may have had. As I said I don’t use the technology that much and the queries are pretty innocuous, so it may be different for others.
Oh, bless your heart, you sweet summer child.
Permanent under the current pricing model, subject to change.