DeepSeek peak/off-peak pricing update

ffagnerbrack about 3 hours ago 44 commentsRead Article on api-docs.deepseek.com

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Discussion (44 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

progval•about 3 hours 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.

vrc•12 minutes ago

It wins on two fronts if this is true. Provides the cheap alternative for the West, and maximizes returns against their homegrown audience.

HarHarVeryFunny•12 minutes ago

Makes sense - many US customers will probably be going to US providers once they release the weights.

Hamuko•about 3 hours 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.

londons_explore•9 minutes ago

> don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.

That sounds like a policy written by someone who doesn't understand how LLM's work...

qup•3 minutes ago

Or who is overly protective after reading about what happened at openai

cheesecakegood•about 2 hours 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.

r00t-•about 1 hour ago

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

thecopy•about 1 hour ago

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

For European and US customers this is effectively 2x increase. I think i wll keep using both Flash and Pro as before.

EDIT: Misread numbers to believe off-peak kept old prices

jLaForest•about 1 hour ago

~200% increase is marginal to you?

127•about 1 hour ago

For the price of can of Coke, you can do a week of work. For most, that is not a bottleneck.

nchmy•about 1 hour ago

200% increase over practically free is still practically free

xbmcuser•9 minutes ago

They benefit from a strong captive market because Chinese firms cannot use Nvidia chips and are legally barred from processing data abroad, forcing them to rely on domestic infrastructure.

HarHarVeryFunny•15 minutes ago

Some of the US companies do the same, but rather than "off-peak" hours they price lower for "batch" jobs with non-committal response times.

The same motivation of course - the GPUs have a finite service lifetime, and to maximize revenue you need to keep them busy 24x7.

roenxi•about 2 hours 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.

Grombobulous•about 1 hour ago

That’s an interesting thing to think about. Still, it’s important for us to remind ourselves that “looks very slightly like” is not the same as the real thing. The A in AI stands for artificial.

The summary of this paper describes my sentiment in better words than I have:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05868-8

It’s very easy for the average person to mistake linguistic ability and simulated problem solving for intelligence and sentience.

ssk42•about 1 hour ago

That’s what my KimiClaw has literally been doing

alexpotato•about 1 hour ago

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.

garrickvanburen•about 1 hour ago

Yes. I focus on pricing software and I’m a bit baffled why frontier models are pushing tokens.

It’s a race to the bottom, and the bottom is unlimited use for a flat monthly rate.

Granular pricing (tokens, minutes, etc) is pretty anti-customer generates less revenue than customer value-based subscriptions (why SaaS is such a good business model)

Grombobulous•about 1 hour ago

But presumably consumers aren’t where the majority of the spend will be.

Consumers don’t generally get usage-based pricing because of the inconvenience and unpredictability, but B2B SaaS products utilize usage-based pricing all the time.

chii•16 minutes ago

> becomes a commodity/race to the bottom.

that's a good outcome - it means they're fungible, and easily available.

vrc•10 minutes ago

Somehow I keep hearing the rumblings of crypto maximalists trying to merge tokens. I actually wouldn’t mind since I signed up directly with some providers I’ve stopped using and have small amounts of credits strewn across the web.

alkonaut•about 3 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 3 hours 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.

hopfenspergerj•about 1 hour 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.

Palmik•about 1 hour ago

Duplicate:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287881

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285160

sebastiennight•about 2 hours 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?

mateenah•about 2 hours 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.

poly2it•about 3 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...

cheesecakegood•about 2 hours ago

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

eastbound•about 2 hours 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)?

floppyd•about 3 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour ago

DeepSeek’s cache pricing was always 1/10th the competition.

It’s still cheaper than everybody else.

k__•about 2 hours ago

I didn't get the impression that anyone competed with the old prices before.

spuz•about 1 hour ago

What do you mean? Most providers on OpenRouter offer the same or lower prices than DeepSeek themselves:

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash#providers

j1elo•about 1 hour ago

So many changes in so little time, that it all makes no sense. Continuous churning. Reminds me of the experience of trying to be on top of the dependencies in a medium-large JS project.

I am a person that buys into a tool or a process and expects it to be part of the life with no major changes through the years (or as long as the need exists). But AI? You buy into something today, not 2 weeks have passed and there's already a large "update" introduced to the conditions or the optimal usage patterns you should be adopting.

It's tiring. Makes all prices and offers feel so unreliable and gets me a bit more disinterested each time they change.

ricardobeat•44 minutes ago

This makes no sense. You want improvements to stop?

These being open, you can keep using the old models indefinitely for as long as there are providers offering them.

j1elo•36 minutes ago

No, I'm talking about the whole sector, not specifically about DeepSeek.

Fully knowing that it is a new industry living its own infancy, it is perfectly normal that there is instability and numerous swings on pricing, conditions, or direction.

But it's not less real that such process can produce churn and consumer fatigue.