https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro/providers
Deepseek v4 Pro is much cheaper when provided by Deepseek itself, likely as a combination of the loss leader strategy you mention and the desire to have more data flow through their pipeline for training. However, the same open weights model, provided by other providers, is somewhere in the $2-3/1M output-tokens range. Compare Opus 4.7 at $25/1M output-tokens.
Unless you mean that releasing open weights models is the loss leader, in which case, you might be right but I hope you're wrong. We've seen some of this from Qwen at least - their latest model is closed only. I hope there's always someone willing to make this bet and release better and better open models.
This is specifically what I meant.
DeepSeek’s official service is trying to recoup some of the training and engineering costs too.
The other providers only have to recoup their hardware costs and the cost of a team to run it.
Even though DeepSeek’s official service is more expensive per token, they’re running at a lower profit than the OpenRouter providers because they had to pay for the R&D.
This is a deliberate choice. We already see it with Qwen splitting their releases between open weight and hosted only models. The open weights are a loss leader to get attention. Without them you’d almost never hear about their hosted models.
What would this bet be? Training is expensive and open weights mean that for hosting you compete on price with people that don't have this item on their bill.