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The cheapest lab stops being cheap: DeepSeek raises API prices from 16 August and starts charging by the clock

DeepSeek has published a new price list for its V4 models, effective 16 August 2026. The company that built its reputation on undercutting everyone else is raising rates across the board — by between 50 percent and more than 1,100 percent, depending on the model, the type of token and the hour of the day. The numbers for DeepSeek-V4-Flash: output tokens go from $0.28 to $1.32 per million at peak, cache-miss input from $0.14 to $0.44, and cached input from $0.0028 to $0.014 — a fivefold rise on the cheapest line in the catalogue. DeepSeek-V4-Pro goes from $0.87 to $3.96 per million output tokens at peak, while its cached input rises from roughly $0.0036 to $0.044 per million: the 1,100 percent figure comes from that one line, not from the headline rate. The structural change matters as much as the numbers. From Sunday the price depends on when the request is made: peak hours are 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, everything else is off-peak and costs exactly half. DeepSeek says the tiered structure is meant to "allocate resources more reasonably" and push developer workloads towards less congested windows. In practice it is the first time a major model provider has made the hour of the day a first-class pricing variable rather than a promotional discount. The timing is what makes this striking. In the same week Anthropic cancelled a planned 50 percent rise for Claude Sonnet 5 and Google put an expiry date on its Gemini 3.7 Flash discount, DeepSeek moved in the opposite direction — and moved further than either. Off-peak V4-Flash output at $0.66 per million is still cheap by Western standards, but the gap that made DeepSeek an obvious default has narrowed by a factor of four or five. Both V4 models keep their 1M-token context window and 384K maximum output; the concurrency limits (2,500 simultaneous requests for Flash, 500 for Pro) are unchanged. We have updated the pricing in both profiles in the catalogue.