What changed for DeepSeek V4 in May and June 2026

Two months of smaller announcements add up. Here is what actually changed for V4 users since the April release, in order of budget impact.

First, third-party pricing settled below the official rate: OpenRouter now lists V4 Flash at $0.089/M input and $0.18/M output against DeepSeek's own $0.14/$0.28. If you don't need first-party features like cache-hit billing, the proxy route is roughly 35% cheaper on input.

Second, the July 24 retirement date for deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner was confirmed, turning a vague deprecation warning into a hard deadline.

Third, tooling caught up: Ollama added V4 Flash to its official library, GGUF quantizations stabilized, and IDE integrations (Cursor, Cline, VS Code extensions) added V4 model IDs to their defaults. The practical effect: running Flash locally or in an agent stack no longer requires custom glue code.