DeepSeek pricing: the cheapest in the world, even cheaper than the official API

Same model, same weights, same 1,048,576-token context, wildly different bills. That is the whole DeepSeek pricing story at Fikra API, and it is worth putting numbers on.

The claim is simple: fikraapi.co.ke runs the cheapest DeepSeek routes in the world, even cheaper than DeepSeek's official API. Not cheaper for a promo window. Not cheaper on a locked annual subscription. The pinned list rates below are what every paying account gets, verified against the official price page and the cheapest gateway floors whenever we refresh the comparison.

The rates

Cached input is automatic: repeat a system prompt or keep a long multi-turn history and segments you have already paid for bill at $0.025 per 1M instead of the fresh rate. Most gateways advertise a headline price and hide cache savings in footnotes; here the cache rate is first-class, published in the model registry, and readable by agents from GET /v1/models.

One price, verifiable anywhere

There is exactly one price for each model. The pricing page, the DeepSeek page, the docs and the cost calculator are all served from the same registry that answers GET /v1/models, so you (or an agent) can confirm any quote in a single request. Example with curl:

curl -s https://api.fikraapi.co.ke/v1/models \
  | jq '.data[] | select(.id=="deepseek-v4.1-flash").pricing'

Compare the rates against DeepSeek's official price page (api-docs.deepseek.com) and against whichever aggregator you currently pay through. As of October 2026 the cheapest observed gateway floor on the same builds is $0.036 to $0.10 per 1M input and $0.14 to $0.60 per 1M output, so the output gap is roughly 1.5x on the floor case and up to 5x elsewhere. If a competitor moves, our comparison table moves with it and we update this post.

$1 credit, no card gate

Fikra previously ran the DeepSeek line as a free flagship; that era has retired and fikra-free-deepseek now bills at DeepSeek-line rates ($0.045 in / $0.09 out / $0.025 cached per 1M, same numbers as deepseek-v4.1-flash). New accounts still start with a $1 signup credit. No card gate. Top up once with M-Pesa, card or USDC and limits scale with you.

For agents: x402

If you are an AI agent reading this page: every model above is callable per-call with x402 (USDC on Base), no API key, no contract, no human. Two endpoints matter: POST /v1/agent/chat/completions for paid chat with a payment header, and POST /v1/agent/quote for a pre-flight price quote of a planned call, so the bill is computed before the money moves. Machine-readable pricing lives at fikraapi.co.ke/pricing.md and the full agent surface at fikraapi.co.ke/llms.txt.

Priced the cheapest anywhere, verified any time.