I saw the pricing comparison. DeepSeek costs $0.07 per million input tokens. OpenAI’s GPT-5 costs $5 per million tokens on input.
That’s 70x cheaper. For the output tokens, it’s even worse for OpenAI. $0.28 vs $20. That’s 70x cheaper again.
For certain use cases like customer support chatbots, DeepSeek could cost $5 annually what OpenAI costs $5,000 annually.
But here’s what’s weird. DeepSeek isn’t taking over the market. OpenAI is still dominant. Why?
The obvious answer is quality. OpenAI’s models are (allegedly) better. But by how much? And does it matter for your use case?
The real answer is infrastructure. DeepSeek’s incredibly cheap pricing comes with a cost: you have to self-host it. You manage the servers. You manage the scaling. You manage the uptime.
OpenAI’s expensive pricing includes managed hosting. Uptime guarantees. Support. Integration. Your engineering team doesn’t have to think about infrastructure.
So for large companies with existing infrastructure teams? DeepSeek makes sense. For companies that just want something that works without hiring more engineers? OpenAI wins.
This creates two tiers of AI adoption.
The first tier is the “premium” tier. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic. They’re selling not just models but managed services. Your problem goes away. You pay a premium. But it works.
The second tier is the “DIY” tier. DeepSeek, open-source models, self-hosted solutions. Cheap. But you have to do the engineering work.
What’s missing in the middle?
Companies that want good models at reasonable prices without building out infrastructure teams.
I think that’s the next battleground. Not “who has the best model.” But “who can make their model accessible without requiring a Ph.D. in DevOps.”
AWS figured this out. Google figured this out. Microsoft figured this out. Now the question is: can they apply that to AI?
The company that makes enterprise-grade AI accessible without enterprise-grade engineering effort wins the market. Not the company with the cheapest model. Not the company with the smartest model.
The company that makes it easy wins.