Published Jul 12, 2026, 12:00 PM ET · Updated 4 months ago · 1 source

DeepSeek cut prices 75%. The 100x problem remains

VentureBeat
VentureBeat
·
Original Report

DeepSeek's recent decision to drastically cut pricing on its V4-Pro model by 75% should have been unequivocally good news for enterprise AI vendors and developers. Instead, many are discovering that cheaper models don’t automatically translate into healthier margins.The reason is simple: While inference costs plummet, agent systems are voraciously consuming tokens faster than prices are declining. For the last 2 decades, software economics was dictated by the same rule. Infra became cheaper ever