Liang Wenfeng on Open Source vs Profit | "Only 6× Profit — Open Source Doesn't Hurt Us"
TL;DR
Liang Wenfeng: DeepSeek only takes 6× profit, so open source doesn't threaten its model; if it were chasing 100× profit, third-party self-hosters at 20× cost would undercut it.
Contents from a DeepSeek investor meeting leaked today. On the tension between open source and commercial revenue, DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng gave a clear financial logic:
> "We only take 6× profit — payback in about 10 months corresponds to roughly 6× profit — under that premise, open source has no effect on the business model. But if we were chasing 100× profit, open source would matter, because third-party self-hosters could hit ~20× cost, undercutting us."
The sentence turns DeepSeek's pricing philosophy into a computable boundary. In the 6× profit zone, open source is actually a distribution accelerator — third parties self-hosting the open weights have roughly the same cost structure as DeepSeek's own service, so they don't cannibalize customers. In the 100× profit zone, open source is equivalent to handing your margin to third-party hosters.
Zooming out, this reasoning reduces the long-running "is open source commercial suicide" debate in China's LLM industry to a specific premium-rate threshold. Over the past year many LLM firms have wavered on whether to open-source — Liang directly reframes the contradiction as a payback-period question, which also explains why DeepSeek has never wavered on the open-source path.
via 36kr
> "We only take 6× profit — payback in about 10 months corresponds to roughly 6× profit — under that premise, open source has no effect on the business model. But if we were chasing 100× profit, open source would matter, because third-party self-hosters could hit ~20× cost, undercutting us."
The sentence turns DeepSeek's pricing philosophy into a computable boundary. In the 6× profit zone, open source is actually a distribution accelerator — third parties self-hosting the open weights have roughly the same cost structure as DeepSeek's own service, so they don't cannibalize customers. In the 100× profit zone, open source is equivalent to handing your margin to third-party hosters.
Zooming out, this reasoning reduces the long-running "is open source commercial suicide" debate in China's LLM industry to a specific premium-rate threshold. Over the past year many LLM firms have wavered on whether to open-source — Liang directly reframes the contradiction as a payback-period question, which also explains why DeepSeek has never wavered on the open-source path.
via 36kr