Based on the best available information, DeepSeek is pricing the API such that they can repay their infra capex over 10 months, while deprecating/amortizing the cost of said infra over 3 years.

For my product, I run GLM 5.2 and other models myself, in production, on rented hardware. Paying API prices would cost much more.

EDIT: You can now see several other third-party providers for Kimi K3 (Nebius, Fireworks). All charge exactly the same as the first-party. Does that mean that their costs are the same? Seems quite unlikely. It's simply not an efficient market, yet.