Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek said it has ended promotional pricing for application programming interface (API) access to its V3 large language model due to a surge in demand.

It was the first price increase since the Hangzhou-based company came to worldwide attention for its models that it said performed on par with US rivals while requiring a fraction of the cost to train.

The new pricing for DeepSeek-chat, powered by V3, is now $0.27 (£0.23) per million token inputs and $1.1 per million outputs, a significant increase from the previous pricing of $0.14 and $0.27.

The pricing is still far below offerings from OpenAI or Anthropic, which respectively charge $30 and $15 per million output tokens for the GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet models.

Server constraints

Last week DeepSeek temporarily stopped allowing developers to top up their accounts for API access, citing server resource constraints as it struggled to keep up with overwhelming demand, but said existing balances could be used.

The firm also placed some restrictions on user sign-ups for its free web and mobile app chatbot due to strong demand, with the web and mobile versions still often telling users that servers are too busy.

The company released V3, a standard large language model (LLM), in December and the R1 reasoning model last month.

Its chatbot surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the world’s fastest-growing AI chatbot based on daily active users, reaching 21 million active users in three weeks after its 8 January Android launch and 10 January iOS launch, according to Aicpb.com figures.

ChatGPT achieved 1.46 million daily active users 20 days after its release in November 2022, which kicked off a worldwide frenzy of investment into similar generative AI systems.

Rising popularity

DeepSeek topped the download rankings in more than 140 markets around the world, according to Appfigures.

The company’s models have been deployed on major cloud services in China as well as in the US, in spite of concerns voiced by western government bodies about security and privacy issues.

Italy’s data protection regulator this month opened a probe into DeepSeek, also ordering it to stop processing Italian users’ data and asking the government to block the app in the country, saying the firm did not appear to be complying with EU data regulations.