New DeepSeek Pricing Published (Peak and Off-Peak)
See here: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/
Peak pricing is twice the price, or, off-peak is half the price.
Peak hours are 01:00 - 04:00 and 06:00 - 10:00 UTC (all other hours are off-peak)
-- V4 FLASH NOW -----------------
Off-peak: $0.007 (cache hit), $0.22 (miss), $0.66 (out)
Peak: $0.014 (cache hit), $0.44 (miss), $1.32 (out)
-- V4 FLASH OLD vs NEW (OFF-PEAK) -----------------
Cache hit: $0.0028 vs $0.007 (+250%)
Cache miss: $0.14 vs $0.22 (+157%)
Output: $0.28 vs $0.66 (+235%)
-- V4 PRO -----------------
Off-peak: $0.022 (cache hit), $0.66 (miss), $1.98 (out)
Peak: $0.044 (cache hit), $1.32 (miss), $3.96 (out)
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Once the page gets updated and lost in time, to compare, the same page from August 1, 2026: https://web.archive.org/web/20260801170952/https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/
I guess it’s not unexpected per se, but the peak hours are solidly Chinese daytime work hours with an extended lunch break, and hitting a bit of Europe’s morning. But no American peak hours, unless you count after-work hobby coding (6-9 pm Pacific?) which tells you indirectly a bit that American adoption is not a major driver of revenue for them. Or that the after-work ‘hobbyist’ is the main audience, which is also plausible.
DeepSeek was already pretty cheap compared to OpenAI and else, but now with peak pricing, it's not as straightforward. GPT-4o mini is $0.15/$0.60 per 1M tokens, while DeepSeek V4 Flash off-peak is $0.22/$0.66. So still cheaper, but the gap is narrowing. But is it worth it for the end user?..
DeekSeek did a strategic b2c mistake. It is always easier to start with higher prices and give discounts than go opposite way (=raise).
But people get used to higher prices. Or they churn out.
For hobby projects there can be local or free models. There are also some caching techniques.
Yeah, they onboarded A LOT of folks with that original pricing and quality. It was "good enough" for most use-cases, like many, I work in existing code-bases and do a lot of "multi-file" edits, that aren't hard to do technically, just take a lot of time and must be done precisely enough. For that, it was perfect.
I wonder how many people will stay, there's still a huge void in alternatives on that original pricing.
Well I could have done without the improvement if it meant keeping the prices low, might have to find a better model for cheap inference
Thank you for old vs new comparison