DeepSeek Peak Hours: live peak / off-peak pricing tracker

· DeepSeek Peak Hours

2 min read Original article ↗

DeepSeek-V4 API · time-of-day pricing

DeepSeek API pricing status: OFF-PEAK

Checking the clock…

New pricing goes live in· · ·16:00 UTC · Sat, Aug 16 2026

A live tracker for DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash time-of-day API pricing, where every token costs exactly 2× during peak hours.

Read the full breakdown of the change

Your day, priced

Peak hours are 01:00-04:00 & 06:00-10:00 UTC, 7 hours a day. The other 17 hours are off-peak, shown here on your clock.

Peak · 2× off-peak ratesOff-peakNow

Peak hours around the world

The same two UTC windows, on everyone's wall clock. The white marker is this exact moment.

The new price list

USD per 1M tokens. Peak is exactly 2× off-peak. Multipliers compare against the old flat rates that applied until the switch (DeepSeek first-party, as listed on OpenRouter). In effect since 16:00 UTC, Aug 16, 2026.

The hike, visualized

Bar length is the multiple of the old flat rate, so the old price is . Both charts share the same scale, so Pro's 12.1× peak cache-hit hike is exactly as big as it looks.

Old flat rateOff-peakPeak

DeepSeek-V4-Flash

DeepSeek-V4-Pro

Sources

Sources: DeepSeek-V4 API pricing announcement (in effect since 16:00 UTC, Aug 16, 2026) · old flat rates from V4-Flash and V4-Pro on OpenRouter. Not affiliated with DeepSeek. Always confirm against the official price sheet before betting the invoice on it.