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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.
It wins on two fronts if this is true. Provides the cheap alternative for the West, and maximizes returns against their homegrown audience.
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.
Makes sense. 60% of the world's population is in Asia and software professionals in Asia are much more likely to prioritize affordable models like DeepSeek over expensive Western ones
Makes sense - many US customers will probably be going to US providers once they release the weights.
Yeah I saw complaints about this under their twitter announcement, that they're giving discounts to the rich foreign customers and screwing their own people.
This is actually not that great for me on the eastern US since I'm a night owl and do all of my best work during the second peak segment. But I was worried the pricing was going to be much higher than it is. Looks like its still generally cheaper than the other chinese models.
Not just domestic. They come from other Asian countries as well. Asia is huge with billions of people and their time zones are not so much different from each other.
That's a bit obvious, isn't it?
Old DeepSeek Flash 0731 prices have been independently reproduced.[1] The issue is DeepSeek being inundated and not having capacity to serve the demand, hence the price increases to significantly dampen demand. Never mind international demand either--just think about the magnitude of Chinese domestic demand. Prices for anything related to AI or computing in general (mobile phones, cloud data centre hosting, etc) will continue to climb fast as demand for computer chips _far_ exceeds supply. DeepSeek doesn't have an option other than to just work away on improving their technology in the period of time before computer chips once again become a commodity. For example, DeepSeek's cache ratio for their models apparently leads to 1/2 GPU time requirement versus the second best provider.[2]
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?
According to their post:
(Input / Output / Cache Read, [$/M])
DeepSeek-V4-Flash:
Prev: 0.14 / 0.28 / 0.0028
Off-Peak: 0.22 (1.6x) / 0.66 (2.4x) / 0.007 (2.5x)
Peak: 0.44 (3.1x) / 1.32 (4.7x) / 0.014 (5.0x)
DeepSeek-V4-Pro:
Prev: 0.435 / 0.87 / 0.003625
Off-Peak: 0.66 (1.5x) / 1.98 (2.3x) / 0.022 (6.1x)
Peak: 1.32 (3.0x) / 3.96 (4.6x) / 0.044 (12.1x)
EDIT: formatting
EDIT2: giving up on the formatting :-/
Ever since I started using flash, it has slowly crept up to be my default for everything. It is at the good enough state for a fraction of everything else that's out there.
As well as the headline in/out changes, people heavily using agentic coding tools will want to note the 6x (off peak) and 12x (peak) increase to cache hit pricing on Pro (since cache hit can easily make up 90%+ of input on long sessions).
DeepSeek was hugely underpricing cache hit pricing before and even after this increase they're still cheaper on that metric than every other provider I'm aware of, but it will put an end to those "I used 1 billion tokens and spent $4" reports.
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...
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.
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.
So OpenAI cut Luna's price by 5x, DeepSeek increased price by 5x!
If I'm reading the benchmarks right, they now went from being much cheaper than Luna (but twice as slow), to being roughly same price (but twice as slow).
So all else being equal, where I would previously have used DeepSeek, I can just use Luna, and get the same result twice as fast?
(Yeah I know benchmarks are mostly nonsense, but the ones measuring time are real, and it's the most precious resource.)
Opencode said they are working on matching the old prices using their own inference.
Right now, they give 4100 credits for Luna and 63 000 for Deepseek on their prepaid plan (both are 2x)
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.
I pay for Google AI Pro (Bought a year in advance) and Gemini is so bad, I burned through 75% of my five hour allowance trying to get it to fix something.
I pasted the same prompt into OpenCode, set to Deepseek v4 flash free and did it first try.
I'm was going to purchase Opencode GO to try it, but seems my timing is really bad :( hope it doesn't go up too much in Opencode or they find other providers. Bad timing!
About 3x increase. Luna is now a much better deal. Hope they don't increase their prices in response.
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.
This actually works out favorably for US customers since the peak hours are Chinese working hours and cheap hours are US working hours.
Not yet, but in the end high quality tokens are a commodity market. Every optimization to increase inference efficiency will be universally rolled out. The 'hyperspenders' will run into demishing returns unless regulatory capture succeeds.
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, so to maximize revenue you need to keep them busy 24x7.
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?
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.
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.
It doesn't make any sense unless they are going to exit from inference market. They will be literally one of the costliest option (by output, for flash) if use openrouter as source.
Are we gonna see "we work those unusual hours because that's when LLMs are cheap"?
Ah well. I spend about $5/month with Deepseek, so now I’ll have to find room in my budget for $15. Might have to tip my barista less or something.
Makes sense, basically increased price for peak hours when they don't have enough infra to serve everyone. Can expect the return of prices back.
This now places deepseek flash v4 from DeepSeek themselves at higher prices than openrouter (depending on caching). Will be interesting to see if third party prices remain the same.
I wonder if this is enough to push people back onto Luna with their comparative price drop
Now Baseten's pricing is cheaper than the official one? Probably won't last, but still interesting.
https://www.baseten.co/pricing/
If anyone has tried Baseten versions of these Chinese frontier models, let me know what you found.
the neat thing about the models being open-weights is there's a dozen other providers on OpenRouter still at the old price, or lower
Now if there could be a bot that defers queries until when it’s cheap…
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)