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ByteDance's cloud switched on the DeepSeek price rise — and left the older build of the same model untouched at a quarter of the price

The increase BytePlus announced five days ago is now live. Since 00:00 Beijing time on 21 August 2026, ModelArk bills deepseek-v4-flash-ga-260731 at $0.44 per million input tokens, $1.32 per million output tokens and $0.014 for cache hits. Batch inference is charged at exactly half: $0.22 and $0.66. What the notice does not mention is the line directly below it in the same table. The April build of the same model, deepseek-v4-flash-260425, is still on sale and its rates were not touched: $0.14 in, $0.28 out. That is 3.1x less on input and 4.7x less on output than the version the platform now recommends. Only one number moves the other way — cache-hit input on the old build costs $0.028, twice the new rate. The rise puts ModelArk exactly level with DeepSeek's own list price, but only at one hour of the day. The vendor charges $0.44 / $1.32 during peak hours (01–04 and 06–10 UTC) and precisely half of that for the remaining eighteen hours. ModelArk has no time-of-day rate at all. The only way to halve the bill there is batch inference — the same 50% discount, paid for with latency instead of a clock. The parity is not limited to the small model. deepseek-v4-pro-ga-260813, the final August build of the larger model, is listed on ModelArk at $1.32 input and $3.96 output — again the vendor's peak rate to the cent, again with no off-peak equivalent.