Pricing

Since 16:00 UTC on 2026-08-16, what a DeepSeek token costs depends on the hour you spend it in – and, since 2026-08-22, on the day of the week too. Since 2026-09-10 Flash costs less at every hour. This page carries the schedule, every card, and a strip that reads your clock – the same data the CLI's estimates switch on, so the page and ds pricing can never disagree.

Right now

The schedule

One table drives everything on this page: each row is a billing period, its window in UTC minutes, the days it applies on, the multiplier on that era's base card, and the instant the row takes effect. The strip above, the CLI's estimates and ds pricing all read the same rows.

The windows are defined in UTC, not Beijing – in Beijing time (UTC+8) the peak hours read 09:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00, which is the Chinese working day. The off-peak window covers the whole European and American working day, so batch work that can move west should.

Weekends have billed off-peak all day since 2026-08-22 16:00 UTC (00:00 Beijing, Sunday 23 August). The weekend is the Beijing Saturday and Sunday, so it turns over at 16:00 UTC, not at midnight UTC – a Friday evening in Europe is already Saturday upstream. That takes peak from 49 hours a week to 35, and it is the one part of this schedule DeepSeek never put in its changelog: the announcement sat in a footnote for a few days and the live page now carries only the settled rule. It survives in the Internet Archive. If you are holding batch work for a cheap hour, hold it for Saturday instead.

The card

USD per 1M tokens, in force since the V4.1 Flash release of 2026-09-10. Off-peak is half of peak by construction. Flash got cheaper on every item – 57% on cached input, 32% on uncached input, 9% on output – and pro did not change:

The retired names deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp still work: V4.1 Flash serves them, at the deepseek-flash price.

The CLI switches cards at 04:00 UTC on 2026-09-10, the instant DeepSeek's release note gives: “New pricing takes effect at 04:00 UTC on Sept 10, 2026.” The pricing page itself carries no time, and until 2026-09-18 we used an inferred 11:00 UTC, bracketed by our docs mirror fetching the old card at 04:50 UTC and the new one at 11:27 UTC.

The context cache stays the biggest lever: a cached input token costs 1/50th of a miss on flash and 1/30th on pro. Prompt structure still dominates a bill – it is worth up to 50×, where the hour of the day is worth 2×.

What it replaced

Two superseded cards. They are here because the ledger keeps token counts rather than dollars, so every call reprices under the card it was actually billed at.

From 2026-08-16 16:00 UTC to the V4.1 cut, flash was deepseek-v4-flash on a card more than twice as dear on cached input; pro's rows were the same as today's:

Before that, the flat card published 2026-08-02 billed at every hour until 2026-08-16 16:00 UTC:

Peak output on pro is 4.6× that card; peak cached input is 12× it. The published increase was steepest exactly where the old card was cheapest, and the V4.1 cut has not brought flash back under it at any hour.

The same answer in the terminal

ds pricing            # period right now, local + UTC + Beijing, both cards
ds pricing --json     # the same, as JSON for scripts

Computed locally from the same schedule – no network call, nothing spent. The cost estimates price each call with the card in force at the moment it was made, which is what lets one ledger span every era. The ledger stores exact token counts rather than dollar amounts, so historical calls can always be repriced under whatever card was, or becomes, real.

Source

The numbers are DeepSeek's own, from the official Models & Pricing page, which dropped the flat card and now shows only these two periods. The CLI carries the same page offline – ds docs show quick_start/pricing – and ds docs sync refreshes it, so the terminal copy, this page and the estimates trace to one upstream.

They are also checked against the bill. A 188,542-token cache-miss call to pro, made off-peak on 2026-08-17, settled at 0.84 CNY – 4.46 CNY per 1M against the published off-peak 4.5, where the old flat card would have made it 3.0. The page and the billing system agree. The V4.1 Flash card has not been checked against a bill yet.