DeepSeek V4-Flash resets the public price benchmark

DeepSeek priced V4-Flash at US$0.14 per million input tokens and US$0.28 per million output tokens. a report cited Artificial Analysis reporting an average benchmark-run cost near US$0.03 and an Intelligence Index score of 50. These are provider prices and third-party benchmark observations, not guarantees of quality, latency, safety or total production cost. Reporting also describes a one-million-token context window and multimodal support.

Impact: model routing should optimise completed-workflow value, reliability and governance rather than token price alone. Low API cost can shift spending towards evaluation, retrieval, orchestration and observability.