Today · October 11

River AI undercuts DeepSeek, GLM by 20%; tiers aren't given

River AI, founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, launched an inference service that runs two Chinese open models, DeepSeek and GLM, at prices 20% below the two original vendors' own rates. An inference service hosts models in its own data centers, runs them for customers and charges by usage. The company announced: "River Inference is live! We're serving DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash for 20% below official provider rates." (River AI, 2026-10-11) Babuschkin says they wrote their training and inference systems from scratch in Rust and claims that makes them much more efficient (Igor Babuschkin, 2026-10-11). Which of the original vendors' price tiers it's comparing against, and what latency and rate limits look like, haven't been disclosed; the low price could also be subsidies to win customers. Our reading: anyone can host an open-weight model, so inference can be bought separately from the model; if this price is real and lasts, DeepSeek and Z.ai (Zhipu), the maker of GLM, will face third-party price competition for their own API business. How we checked →

Concept illustration: on the left stands a tall red-orange cabinet whose top sign is lettered "RIVER AI" beside a red and a blue slanted rounded bar, with two stacked dark screens each showing a white speech bubble with grey lines, labelled below "DEEPSEEK V4.1 FLASH" and "GLM 5.3 FLASH". On the right, a person dressed in black with a lanyard badge stands at a tall black desk typing on a laptop and looks toward the cabinet, against an off-white wall and a beige floor.

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 12, 2026, alongside 13 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "River AI undercuts DeepSeek, GLM by 20%; tiers aren't given." https://secondsource.io/en/product/2026-10-12-1/. Accessed access date.