DeepSeek Opens V4.1-Flash-1017 Weights and $0.75 Search API

DeepSeek posted V4.1-Flash-1017 to Hugging Face on October 17, 2026 under an MIT license, pairing the weights drop with an open rate card for its Search and Fetch APIs at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. The model card describes the release as "a minor update to DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, delivering substantial improvements across reasoning, coding, agentic tasks, and visual benchmarks," and credits the update with reducing "task execution time and output length, enabling users to complete tasks faster and at lower cost."

The headline score is 77.0 on DeepSWE v1.1, up from the previous Flash's 74.2 and ahead of Claude Opus 5 (74.0) and GPT-5.6 Sol (73.0) on that specific coding benchmark, per MarkTechPost. Terminal-Bench 4.0 jumps to 42.3 from 31.2. MarkTechPost reports the new checkpoint beats the previous Flash on all 11 benchmarks DeepSeek published, by 2.0 to 11.1 points. On raw reasoning, Opus 5 still leads: HLE comes in at 42.6 for Flash-1017 versus 56.3 for Opus.

Pricing on DeepSeek's own serve is $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, with cache reads at $0.003/M. The new Search and Fetch endpoints are capped at 5 QPS per account; server-side calls routed through the DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex stay free until November 1, 2026. The companion paper is titled "DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compression," placing the memory story on the cover, and arriving in the middle of a run of tracked inference-side KV cache work over the past month.

Context is 1M tokens with max output at or above 256K, and the recommended sampling is temperature 1.0, top_p 1.0.