DeepSeek’s 75% price cut drives new U.S. business

Hangzhou-based AI startup DeepSeek reduced the price of its V4 Pro model by 75% and topped Ramp’s June trending vendor index, which tracks when U.S. companies pay a software vendor for the first time.

Ramp compiled the index using payment data from more than 50,000 U.S. businesses and looked back to May. DeepSeek led the list of newly paid vendors in June, reflecting an increase in first-time commercial payments to the company from U.S. firms.

Benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis evaluated the V4 Pro after the price cut and ranked it highly on intelligence-per-dollar. In legal AI tests, the firm placed V4 Pro just below GPT-5.5 and described it as viable for professional workloads.

Cost differences are a factor in purchasing decisions. Competing U.S. providers have high valuations that market participants say make deep, sustained price cuts difficult. Anthropic filed for an initial public offering on June 1 with a proposed valuation near $965 billion, and OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round in March that valued the company at about $852 billion.

Some U.S. companies are paying DeepSeek directly and routing live business data to servers hosted in China rather than self-hosting open-source models. Ara Kharazian, lead economist at Ramp Economics Lab, described the pattern this way: “In probably the biggest sign that companies are looking for cheaper alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic, some are willing to use cheaper, Chinese models, sending U.S. data back and forth from China-hosted servers.”

Budget pressure has been cited by technology leaders. Uber’s chief technology officer reported that the company had already used its entire 2026 AI budget. For businesses that track unit economics, a steep price cut combined with strong benchmark performance alters the comparison between hosting models and paying an external vendor.

DeepSeek’s share of the U.S. market remains small compared with larger American rivals, and many enterprise customers continue to use domestic providers or self-hosted solutions for sensitive workloads. Ramp’s index measures new commercial relationships, so the ranking reflects firms that began paying DeepSeek for the first time rather than overall market dominance.

DeepSeek is among several international AI startups using aggressive pricing to attract commercial customers. Analysts and procurement officers cited cost and benchmark results as key factors in vendor selection.