Deepseek led Ramp's fastest-growing software vendors in June 2026 as US companies shift toward cheaper AI models.

Deepseek topped Ramp's trending software vendors category in June 2026, driven by companies paying Deepseek directly and sending data through its platform. Deepseek had hit 0.3 percent adoption among US companies in January 2025 before falling to 0.1 percent, with data covering real transactions from over 50,000 companies.

Deepseek V4, launched at the end of April, costs a fraction of the price of leading Western models, with the performance gap 'far smaller than the price gap.' Inference platforms like Fireworks AI, fal AI, and DeepInfra are also growing as companies use them to run open-source models instead of paying OpenAI or Anthropic.

A December 2025 report showed Chinese models like Deepseek and Alibaba's Qwen passed US rivals in Hugging Face downloads for the first time, accounting for over 44 percent of all downloads of popular new models. Ramp's data does not support the 'SaaSpocalypse'—design tools like Figma and Paper remain in demand despite AI products like Anthropic's Claude.