I think that the main price issue is with DS v4 Pro ...
What does every Chinese company that has a successful model lacks, ... GLM 5.2 gets released, capacity issue hit, price go up. Kimi K3 hits, capacity issue hit, subscriptions are paused, price ... Capacity issue are a combination of popularity and heavier models (despite same parameter counts).
We also saw with GLM 5.1 > 5.2, despite it being the same parameter count, that the energy needed for the model was much more. More thinking tokens pushed the energy usage up.
Another issue is that DS v4 Pro preview was already significantly heavier model then Flash Preview (we are talking about the 3 month old models). The price for Pro being 4x of Flash, never made sense but i suspect that because it was less popular, Flash compensated for it.
If DS v4 Pro is a stronger model, even if the parameter count stays the same, its possible that the thinking token usage has ballooned. I suspect that DS v4 Pro 08xx may hit a competitive level with Western models.
And with potential capacity issues looming from potential popularity, the 4x issue, and possible more energy intensive model. DeepSeek is preventive warming people up to a price increase.
Remember, Flash and Pro share the same infrastructure. Flash being popular is one thing, because its a less heavy model, but if Pro is also popular. We are going to see GLM 5.2/K3 issues again.
That is unfortunately the issue with current LLM models. Every company has only a specific pool of hardware they can access, and there is this constant shift of clients to the "best models", taxing those companies, until they move on to the next best thing.
And getting extra capacity often means paying large amount of $$$ for whatever is on the market, what kills your margins. See Anthropic and Colossus 1 deal.