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Public story · 2026-09-10 · high
Starting September 14, production requests get rerouted to a different model at Flash pricing, with no opt-out mentioned.
Why now: The switch takes effect September 14, four days after DeepSeek's Hacker News thread on the change.
DeepSeek will start routing V4-Pro API traffic to V4.1 Flash on September 14, at 12:00 Beijing time, according to a Hacker News thread that reached 491 points. Requests sent to the Pro endpoint get served by Flash instead, billed at Flash rates.
The pricing shift is real money for anyone running volume. Off-peak, Flash runs $0.003 per million cached input tokens, $0.15 for cache-miss input, and $0.60 for output, then doubles across the board during peak hours. A V4-Pro deployment was built around a different cost model. Now it inherits Flash's.
What stands out in the thread is the swap itself, not pricing. The top comments push back on DeepSeek changing which model answers a request that names a specific model. A team that validated V4-Pro's outputs, tuned prompts against its behavior, and shipped it into production doesn't get a vote. They get four days.
Name the mechanism: an endpoint labeled V4-Pro will serve V4.1 Flash responses starting September 14, and DeepSeek isn't asking first. If you have V4-Pro wired into anything that matters, pin a version or migrate the integration before the switch. Then confirm Flash's output still passes whatever validation got V4-Pro into production in the first place.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
DeepSeek posted a community notice: once V4.1 Flash launches around September 10 Beijing time, and until a V4.1 Pro exists, every V4 Pro request routes to V4.1 Flash and bills at Flash unit pricing. The stated reason is that Flash has surpassed Pro on performance, cost, speed...
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