DeepSeek peak/off-peak pricing update

(api-docs.deepseek.com)

56 points | by fagnerbrack 2 hours ago ago

20 comments

  • progval an hour ago

    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.

    • thecopy 2 minutes ago

      Peak Hours: 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC

      For European and US customers this is effectively no/marginal increase. I think i wll keep using both Flash and Pro as before.

    • r00t- 4 minutes ago

      That's a bit obvious, isn't it?

    • Hamuko an hour ago

      Not that surprised about it. Personally I've seen companies really just go all-in on a single provider, and that has usually been Anthropic. I don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.

      • cheesecakegood 39 minutes ago

        Also 6-9pm Pacific I think is (coincidentally) peak so it hits the ‘after work hobbyists’ still, which is I suspect is their current main audience.

  • roenxi 17 minutes ago

    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.

    • ssk42 a minute ago

      That’s what my KimiClaw has literally been doing

  • alkonaut an hour ago

    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?

    • zupa-hu an hour ago

      # Flash, off-peak

          cache-hit 2.5x
          cache-miss 1.57x
          out 2.36x
      
      # Flash, peak

          cache-hit 5x
          cache-miss 3.14x
          out 4.71x
      
      Edit: fixed the numbers and formatting
    • embedding-shape 36 minutes ago

      Someone made a comparison yesterday, including relative increases, and GPT-5.6 Luna, then later someone also added more OpenAI, Anthropic, K3 and GLM 5.2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286679

      Already outdated though I think, as GLM 5.3 is latest now :)

    • floppyd an hour ago

      About 2x-2.5x off-peak for Flash, 2x-4x I'd say for Pro (x6 on cache in, the biggest increase throughout the board). And twice as much in peak hours.

  • mateenah 17 minutes ago

    This is good for other competitors I guess. People rarely calculate the bump in price but the fact that price is increasing might bring them to other vendors.

  • sebastiennight 24 minutes ago

    With proprietary labs lowering their prices and Deepseek raising theirs over time, wouldn't it possible to extrapolate a graph to look at where the terminal frontier-model million-token-cost asymptotes to?

  • cheesecakegood 38 minutes ago

    I wonder if this is enough to push people back onto Luna with their comparative price drop

    • eastbound 34 minutes ago

      After the big onshore migrations (startup people migrating to the SV),

      The big Covid migrations (startup prople migrating to the countryside),

      Will we see the big AI migrations (people travelling to where AI is the cheapest)?

  • poly2it 2 hours ago

    That's a hefty increase. Flash pricing during peak is now 1.32/M out, compared to the current 0.28/M, which in turn is a quite a bit above the cheapest provider at 0.16/M.

    https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...

  • floppyd an hour ago

    Full table with multipliers from previous prices:

    DeepSeek-V4-Flash (off-peak, x2 for peak)

    * Cache Hit $0.007 (x2.5)

    * Cache Miss $0.22 (x1.5)

    * Output $0.66 (x2.25)

    DeepSeek-V4-Pro (off-peak, x2 for peak)

    * Cache Hit $0.022 (x6)

    * Cache Miss $0.66 (x1.5)

    * Output $1.98 (x2.25)

    Peak Hours: 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC

    Effective from: 16:00, August 16, 2026 (UTC)

    • spuz 42 minutes ago

      I wonder whether all the DeepSeek providers will follow suit or are they going to try to stay competitive with the old prices?