DeepSeek Introduces Peak-Hour Pricing That Quadruples Current Levels

DeepSeek is adding peak-hour pricing for its flagship V4 models that will quadruple the current levels, Bloomberg reported Thursday (Aug. 13).

The pricing adjustment announced Thursday by the artificial intelligence (AI) company will take effect on Sunday (Aug. 16), according to the report.

When the changes are implemented, users of the DeepSeek-V4-Flash model will pay $1.32 for 1 million output tokens during peak hours, and half that during off-peak hours. Those figures are up from the current 28 cents for 1 million tokens, the report said.

For DeepSeek’s V4-Pro model, the new price will be $3.96 for 1 million tokens during peak hours and half that during non-peak hours, up from the current 87 cents per million tokens, per the report.

The report said DeepSeek’s new prices remain lower than those of its main competitors. Moonshot’s Kimi K3 costs $15 per million output tokens, while Anthropic’s Fable 5 is priced at $50, according to the report.

In a Thursday update to its change log announcing the pricing adjustment, DeepSeek said: “With the official release of the DeepSeek V4 model family, we will update and adjust API pricing. To allocate resources more reasonably, we will adopt peak/off-peak pricing, with off-peak prices set at half of the peak-hour prices, encouraging users to schedule their tasks based on actual usage.”

DeepSeek initially gained attention in January 2025 when it debuted an AI model that sent shockwaves through the AI world by offering performance comparable to those of American rivals OpenAI and Meta while using substantially fewer Nvidia chips.

It was reported in April that DeepSeek was offering developers discounts amid increasing competition in China’s AI space. DeepSeek said at the time that it was offering a 75% discount to developers using its DeepSeek-V4-Pro model until May 5.

On Aug. 6, it was reported that DeepSeek had resumed its second funding round and is looking to raise close to $8 billion at a valuation of about $74 billion.

It was reported Wednesday (Aug. 12) that DeepSeek is building a new team to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code in the market for AI agents that automate work for business professionals.

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