DeepSeek V4 API Price Increase (Aug 16, 2026): New Peak/Off-Peak Rates

What happened. DeepSeek's new peak/off-peak API pricing for the V4 model family took effect at 16:00 UTC on August 16, 2026 — the schedule DeepSeek published on its official pricing page and confirmed in its Aug 13, 2026 changelog entry. Off-peak rates are half of peak rates; peak hours are 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, Monday through Friday — every other hour is off-peak, including all of Saturday and Sunday and Chinese public holidays in full, so roughly 79% of the week bills at half rate. The old "significant increase expected" warning is gone — the concrete numbers are now live on api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing (verified August 16, 2026; re-verified September 20, 2026).

What the new DeepSeek V4 rates are (per 1M tokens)

Update (2026-09-12) — the two V4-Flash rows above are historical. DeepSeek retired V4-Flash on Sept 10, 2026 and shipped DeepSeek V4.1-Flash under the API name deepseek-flash: off-peak $0.15 cache-miss input / $0.60 output / $0.003 cached input per 1M tokens, with the peak band exactly 2× ($0.30 / $1.20 / $0.006). The retired IDs deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp are still accepted — requests are served by V4.1-Flash and billed at the Flash price. V4 Pro is not retired: DeepSeek announced a Sept 14, 2026 reroute of deepseek-v4-pro to V4.1-Flash on Sept 10 and withdrew it on Sept 11, 2026, keeping V4 Pro service and billing unchanged — so the V4-Pro rows below are still current. Full analysis: DeepSeek V4.1-Flash pricing: the 100x cached-input spread and the withdrawn Sept 14 V4 Pro reroute.

Previous (pre-hike, effective until 16:00 UTC Aug 16): V4-Flash $0.0028 (cache hit) / $0.14 (cache miss) / $0.28 output; V4-Pro $0.003625 / $0.435 / $0.87.

How much did prices actually go up?

• V4-Flash: off-peak ≈ 2.5x (cache hit) / 1.6x (cache miss) / 2.4x (output); peak ≈ 5x / 3.1x / 4.7x.
• V4-Pro: off-peak ≈ 6.1x (cache hit) / 1.5x (cache miss) / 2.3x (output); peak ≈ 12.1x / 3.0x / 4.6x.
• The single largest jump is V4-Pro cache-hit input at peak — roughly 12x the old rate.
• TechStartups frames the overall increase as 50% to 1,100% above the old schedule (Aug 13, 2026); Bloomberg's paywalled report described it as "quadrupling peak prices."

Alongside the pricing change, the Aug 13 changelog entry also marked DeepSeek-V4-Pro GA (APP/Web/API, model name unchanged, native Responses API, three thinking-effort levels: low/high/max).

What the increase costs an agency

DeepSeek was the default "cheapest stack" assumption in agency cost models. That assumption does not survive the new table:

• At peak, V4-Flash output ($1.32/1M) now sits above Gemini 3.7 Flash intro pricing ($0.75/$3.75 per 1M through 2026-12-31), Muse Glimmer hosted on Together AI ($0.35/$1.50), and within reach of Grok 4.6 ($2/$6) and Qwen 3.8 Max ($2/$6).
• At peak, V4-Pro ($1.32 input / $3.96 output) overlaps Claude Sonnet 5 ($2/$10) on input and approaches premium frontier on output — the "cheap reasoning model" positioning is gone for peak-hour work.
• Cache hits and off-peak scheduling are now the levers. Off-peak cache-hit input is $0.022 (V4 Pro, unchanged) — and the retired V4-Flash IDs now bill at V4.1-Flash's $0.003 cache-hit rate — the rates that stay near the old price level.
• Margin impact: for an agency whose retainer was priced on the old Flash schedule, a peak-hour agentic workload now costs ~3–5x on the compute line. That changes project margins unless the estimate is re-baselined.

What to do now

1. Re-run every estimate that assumed DeepSeek pricing with the new table (use this calculator's model strategy selector for the updated comparison).
2. Schedule batch and non-urgent work off-peak (outside 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC) to lock the half-price tier.
3. Exploit cache hits. Prompt-cached workloads at off-peak are the cheapest live option in the family.
4. Re-benchmark alternatives: Gemini 3.7 Flash intro ($0.75/$3.75, through 2026-12-31), Grok 4.6 ($2/$6, 500K context), Qwen 3.8 Max ($2/$6 open weights), and self-hosted V4 (weights are MIT-licensed — sustained workloads can be served directly via vLLM-class tooling).

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• DeepSeek official pricing page (live verified Aug 16, 2026 — new peak/off-peak table active): api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing
• DeepSeek API pricing — V4.1-Flash sheet, legacy-ID billing and the withdrawn Sept 14 V4 Pro reroute (verified 2026-09-12): api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing
• DeepSeek news — Introducing DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (Sept 10, 2026): deepseek.com/en/news/deepseek-v4-1-flash
• DeepSeek changelog, "DeepSeek-V4-Pro Update" (Aug 13, 2026 — GA + API Pricing Adjustment): api-docs.deepseek.com/updates
• TechStartups (Aug 13, 2026 — 50% to 1,100% above current): techstartups.com
• Elser AI (Aug 14, 2026 — 16:00 UTC confirmation + full table): elser.ai
• Reuters + Bloomberg (Aug 13, 2026 — paywalled; registered-uncited corroboration)

Accuracy note: All new rates, peak hours (01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, Monday–Friday, excluding Chinese public holidays), and the effective date (16:00 UTC Aug 16, 2026) are verified against DeepSeek's official pricing page and changelog — first checked Aug 16, 2026 and re-verified Sept 20, 2026, when the weekday/holiday scoping was added to this page (the rates themselves were unchanged). Multiplier math (e.g., 5x, 12.1x) is derived from the published before/after rates, not a DeepSeek statement. The 50%–1,100% range is TechStartups' framing; "quadruples peak prices" is Bloomberg's framing (paywalled). The two V4-Flash rows are the Aug 16, 2026 rates and are marked superseded: DeepSeek retired V4-Flash on Sept 10, 2026 and the legacy IDs now bill at V4.1-Flash rates ($0.15/$0.60 off-peak, $0.003 cached input). The V4-Pro rates remain current — the announced Sept 14 reroute was withdrawn on Sept 11, 2026. DeepSeek reserves the right to adjust prices — re-verify before quoting. V4 weights remain MIT-licensed for self-host escape hatch purposes.