DeepSeek rolls out peak/off-peak pricing on V4-Pro, effective Aug 16 16:00 UTC
DeepSeek
DeepSeek announced that V4-Pro (the 0813 build) will move to a peak/off-peak billing model starting 16:00 UTC on August 16, 2026, with off-peak rates 50% lower than peak. Peak hours are 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC. New V4-Pro rates per 1M tokens: $0.022 / $0.66 / $1.98 off-peak (cache hit / cache miss / output) and $0.044 / $1.32 / $3.96 at peak, with a concurrency limit of 500.
Why it matters
First major Chinese lab to ship time-of-day pricing on a frontier model — a signal that off-peak compute is now being sold as a separate product, which will reshape how agent workloads are scheduled across regions.
Importance: 3/5
First peak/off-peak pricing on a Chinese frontier model API (DeepSeek V4-Pro).