DeepSeek slashes off-peak API prices by 50% as V4 lineup launches
DeepSeek API Pricing Update
DeepSeek announced an API pricing update alongside the release of its V4 model lineup. The new pricing introduces peak and off-peak rates, with off-peak usage costing 50% less, aiming to give developers more flexibility in scheduling workloads. The changes take effect on August 16, 2026, at 16:00 UTC. The announcement has sparked mixed reactions, with some users criticizing the regional pricing structure and others questioning the value proposition of the new models.
Off-peak rates are 50% lower than peak, enabling more flexible workload scheduling.
- progval
Interesting to see that peak hours are work hours in China, night in the US and Europe, and also morning in Europe. So Deepseek's customers are mostly domestic.
- javier123454321
Ever since I started using flash, it has slowly crept up to be my default for everything. It is at the good enough state for a fraction of everything else that's out there.
- alkonaut
There is no relative/percentage increases noted (understandably). Just because i'm lazy: roughly how much more expensive is it to work with v4 flash and v4 pro through the API, compared to before the price increases? Is it 2x, 5x, 10x higher?
- dhx
Old DeepSeek Flash 0731 prices have been independently reproduced.[1] The issue is DeepSeek being inundated and not having capacity to serve the demand, hence the price increases to significantly dampen demand. Never mind international demand either--just think about the magnitude of Chinese domestic demand. Prices for anything related to AI or computing in general (mobile phones, cloud data centre hosting, etc) will continue to climb fast as demand for computer chips _far_ exceeds supply. DeepSeek doesn't have an option other than to just work away on improving their technology in the period of time before computer chips once again become a commodity. For example, DeepSeek's cache ratio for their models apparently leads to 1/2 GPU time requirement versus the second best provider.[2]
- alexpotato
I'm no expert in pricing economics but once peak/off-peak pricing arrives, it seems like tokens are going to be like electricity or long distance phone minutes where it just becomes a commodity/race to the bottom.
- roenxi
This is somewhat funny when you realise the data centres are now going to start a process that looks very so slightly like daydreaming. Depending on the time of day they're going to be thinking about different things in a cyclic manner. They're going to be doing things like finishing a hard days work then kicking back to think about tricky math problems.
- usagisushi
According to their post:
(Input / Output / Cache Read, [$/M])
DeepSeek-V4-Flash:
Prev: 0.14 / 0.28 / 0.0028
Off-Peak: 0.22 (1.6x) / 0.66 (2.4x) / 0.007 (2.5x)
Peak: 0.44 (3.1x) / 1.32 (4.7x) / 0.014 (5.0x)
DeepSeek-V4-Pro:
Prev: 0.435 / 0.87 / 0.003625
Off-Peak: 0.66 (1.5x) / 1.98 (2.3x) / 0.022 (6.1x)
Peak: 1.32 (3.0x) / 3.96 (4.6x) / 0.044 (12.1x)
gpt-5.6-luna: $0.20 / $1.20 / $0.02 / $0.25 (In / Out / Cache Read / Cache Write)
EDIT: formatting
EDIT2: giving up on the formatting :-/
- petercooper
As well as the headline in/out changes, people heavily using agentic coding tools will want to note the 6x (off peak) and 12x (peak) increase to cache hit pricing on Pro (since cache hit can easily make up 90%+ of input on long sessions).
DeepSeek was hugely underpricing cache hit pricing before and even after this increase they're still cheaper on that metric than every other provider I'm aware of, but it will put an end to those "I used 1 billion tokens and spent $4" reports.