DeepSeek tops US vendor index after 75% price cut

DeepSeek, an AI startup based in Hangzhou, led Ramp’s June trending vendor index after the company cut the price of its V4 Pro model by 75%. Ramp’s index looks back to May and measures when U.S. businesses first pay a software vendor.

Ramp, a corporate spending platform that tracks payments from more than 50,000 U.S. businesses, recorded an increase in initial payments to DeepSeek for the month. The platform’s index identifies vendors that are newly receiving payments from its sample of companies.

Benchmark firm Artificial Analysis reassessed DeepSeek after the price cut and ranked the V4 Pro model highly on intelligence-per-dollar. On legal AI benchmarks, Artificial Analysis placed V4 Pro just below a leading model identified as GPT-5.5, indicating the firm found the model capable of handling professional workloads at a lower price point.

Several U.S. companies are paying DeepSeek directly and sending live business queries and documents to servers hosted in China rather than self-hosting open-source models locally. DeepSeek sells access to hosted models, so using its service typically involves transmitting proprietary business data to its China-based infrastructure.

Cost pressure in corporate AI spending is a factor behind the shift. Some commercial models charge by token consumption, which can raise vendor revenue as usage increases. Separately, an executive at a major U.S. tech company reported that the firm had exhausted its AI budget for 2026, underscoring budget constraints for some customers.

DeepSeek’s U.S. market share remains modest compared with larger American providers, but the company’s steep discount and competitive benchmark placement made it an option for companies seeking lower-cost suppliers.

Anthropic filed for an initial public offering valuing the company at roughly $965 billion on June 1. OpenAI completed a funding round in March that implied a valuation of about $852 billion. Those reported valuations are part of the broader market context for vendor pricing and competition.

Ara Kharazian, lead economist at Ramp Economics Lab, warned that some companies are prioritizing immediate cost savings by using lower-cost Chinese models and routing U.S. data through China-hosted servers. Ramp’s payment records and Artificial Analysis’s benchmarks were cited as the primary data points for the vendor rankings and pricing comparisons in this report.