DeepSeek pushed V4-Flash-0731 out of preview on July 31, 2026, and the headline number is hard to ignore: on Terminal-Bench 2.1, the "cheap" Flash model now scores 82.7, ahead of DeepSeek's own V4-Pro-Preview at 72.1, and only 2.3 points behind Claude Opus 4.8's 85.0. That's a budget model beating its own flagship on agentic coding tasks, at a fraction of the price.
What actually changed
DeepSeek didn't ship a new architecture. V4-Flash-0731 is the same base model, re-post-trained with an emphasis on agentic and coding workflows. The jump from the Flash preview's 61.8 to 82.7 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 comes entirely from that retraining, not new parameters or a bigger context window. The build also adds Codex support, which the preview version lacked.
That's worth sitting with for a second: DeepSeek proved that better post-training data can close a 20-point benchmark gap without touching the underlying architecture. It's the same lesson OpenAI and Anthropic have been leaning on for their own "mini" and "flash" tiers, just executed unusually well here.
Pricing
V4-Flash-0731 is priced through DeepSeek's API at:
| Metric | Price |
|---|---|
| Input tokens (cache miss) | $0.14 / million |
| Input tokens (cache hit) | $0.0028 / million |
| Output tokens | $0.28 / million |
| Concurrency limit | 2,500 |
For comparison, that cache-hit input price is roughly 1/700th of what most frontier labs charge for their top-tier models. If your workload has any repeated context, caching alone makes this one of the cheapest capable coding models on the market right now.
How it stacks up
| Model | Terminal-Bench 2.1 | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 4.8 | 85.0 | Frontier tier, priced accordingly |
| DeepSeek V4-Flash-0731 | 82.7 | Budget tier pricing |
| DeepSeek V4-Pro-Preview | 72.1 | Beaten by DeepSeek's own Flash model |
| DeepSeek V4-Flash (preview) | 61.8 | Superseded by this release |
Beating your own Pro-tier model with the Flash tier is an unusual look, and DeepSeek hasn't said whether V4-Pro will get the same retraining treatment. If it does, expect another jump soon.
What people are actually saying
Reaction on Hacker News has been notably positive, with commenters pointing out that Flash-class models are now genuinely runnable on local hardware for under $10,000, which matters if you care about not being at the mercy of an API provider's pricing changes. Threads on r/LocalLLaMA and r/DeepSeek show people stockpiling API credits and treating this as confirmation that DeepSeek can keep competing without following Silicon Valley's pricing playbook. The usual caveats about a Chinese lab handling your data still come up in those threads, and they're worth taking seriously if you're routing anything sensitive through the API.
Should you switch?
If you're currently paying frontier prices for agentic coding tasks and your workload tolerates a small quality gap, this is worth testing. The 2.3-point Terminal-Bench gap against Opus 4.8 is small enough that it won't be noticeable on most real tasks, and the price difference is not small. If you're already running [Claude Opus 5](https://questloops.com/blog/claude-opus-5-explained-pricing-benchmarks-and-where-it-actually-wins) or comparing it against [Grok 4.5](https://questloops.com/blog/grok-4-5-explained-pricing-benchmarks-and-where-it-actually-wins), it's worth running V4-Flash-0731 against your own eval set before committing either way. Benchmarks are a starting point, not a verdict.
