DeepSeek V4 shipped on April 24, 2026 — four days after Moonshot's Kimi K2.6, one day after OpenAI's GPT-5.5. Two MIT-licensed models, both 1M-context: V4-Pro at 1.6T total / 49B active, and V4-Flash at 284B / 13B active. The headline number is the price: $3.48 per million output tokens for V4-Pro vs $25 for Claude Opus 4.7 and $30 for GPT-5.5. (DeepSeek is also running a launch promo at 75% off — $0.87/M output — through May 5, 2026, which widens the gap further during the evaluation window.) That's a 7-9x gap at the standard rate, against a model that's within ~5-7 points of the closed frontier on most coding benchmarks. That gap is large enough to make many teams reconsider their model routing decisions. But price isn't the complete picture. V4 performs well on some workloads and poorly on others, and integration is more difficult than the marketing suggests. Here's the assessment, engineer reports, and what's new under the hood.…