DeepSeek peak/off-peak pricing update

(api-docs.deepseek.com)

62 points | by fagnerbrack 2 hours ago

10 comments

  • Palmik 2 minutes ago
  • progval 1 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 13 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- 14 minutes ago
      That's a bit obvious, isn't it?
    • Hamuko 1 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 50 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 27 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 12 minutes ago
      That’s what my KimiClaw has literally been doing
  • hopfenspergerj 7 minutes ago
    Does the API response include a "service tier" response to indicate whether you paid peak/off-peak for a given request? I like to compute cost for each request, and save it with my results.
  • alkonaut 1 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 1 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 46 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 1 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 27 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 35 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 48 minutes ago
    I wonder if this is enough to push people back onto Luna with their comparative price drop
    • eastbound 44 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 1 hour 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 1 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 53 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?
      • trollbridge 5 minutes ago
        DeepSeek’s cache pricing was always 1/10th the competition.

        It’s still cheaper than everybody else.

      • k__ 17 minutes ago
        I didn't get the impression that anyone competed with the old prices before.