Key Terms
- Peak/off-peak pricing - now live: peak hours are 01:00-04:00 and 06:00-10:00 UTC Monday-Friday (09:00-12:00 and 14:00-18:00 Beijing); all other hours, including weekends, are off-peak at exactly half the peak rate. Applies to all billing items. Source: DeepSeek – Pricing
- DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 - the general-availability Pro model (August 12-13), 1.6T total / 49B active MoE, 1M context, 384K max output, agent-focused post-training. Source: DeepSeek – Pricing , Aliyun – Newly Released Models
- deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp - experimental vision model on the Flash base; images are tokenized by dimensions and billed as input tokens. DeepSeek's first API vision capability. Source: DeepSeek – Pricing , DeepSeek – Vision
- Anthropic-format API - Deepseek – Anthropic endpoint enabling Claude Code and Anthropic-SDK compatibility alongside OpenAI and Responses formats. Source: DeepSeek – Pricing
Latest Changes
Changes since the 2026-07 report.
July watch items verified:
- V4-Pro official release: confirmed. DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 left preview and went GA on the API, app, and third-party platforms on August 12-13, now the pinned model version on the pricing page. Sources: DeepSeek – Pricing , Local-Ai-Zone – Ai Updates August 2026
- Peak/valley (off-peak 2x) pricing: confirmed live. The undated announcement from July became active (with rates effective August 16 per aggregator coverage): peak = 2x off-peak, Monday-Friday Beijing business hours. Sources: DeepSeek – Pricing , Local-Ai-Zone – Ai Updates August 2026
- Vision API availability: partial. deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp now offers experimental image input via API (billed as tokens); Pro remains text-only. Source: DeepSeek – Pricing
- V4-Pro Codex integration (promised early August): confirmed. The Agent Integrations docs cover Codex alongside Claude Code; both models support OpenAI, Responses, and Anthropic API formats. Sources: DeepSeek – Codex , DeepSeek – Pricing
- US blacklist review: still-pending. No action found in August following June's Reuters report that the US held off adding DeepSeek. Source: Reuters – Us Holds Off Blacklisting Chinas Deepseek More Than 100 Firms Deemed Security 2026 06 17
New August changes:
- Price change (increase, plus time-of-day multiplier): V4-Pro moved from flat $0.435/$0.87 per MTok (input miss/output) to $0.66/$1.98 off-peak and $1.32/$3.96 peak; V4-Flash moved from $0.14/$0.28 to $0.22/$0.66 off-peak and $0.44/$1.32 peak. Cache-hit: Pro $0.022 off-peak / $0.044 peak; Flash $0.007 / $0.014. Source: DeepSeek – Pricing
- New capability: deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp experimental vision API (August). Source: DeepSeek – Vision
- Spec increase: max output raised to 384K tokens across models (1M context). Source: DeepSeek – Pricing
- Deprecation scheduled: deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner API aliases will be deprecated October 24, 2026 (migration to V4 models). Source: Aitoolsrecap – Ai News August 31 2026
- Distribution: V4-Pro-0813 and V4-Flash-0731 listed on Alibaba Bailian (Aug 14 / Aug 1). Source: Aliyun – Newly Released Models
Plans
DeepSeek is API-only: no subscription plans, top-up balance billing. Concurrency limits: 2,500 (Flash), 500 (Pro). Source: DeepSeek – Pricing
API Pricing
| Model | Input (cache miss) | Input (cache hit) | Output | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| deepseek-v4-pro (peak) | $1.32/MTok | $0.044 | $3.96/MTok | Peak: Mon-Fri 01:00-04:00, 06:00-10:00 UTC |
| deepseek-v4-pro (off-peak) | $0.66/MTok | $0.022 | $1.98/MTok | All other hours incl. weekends |
| deepseek-v4-flash (peak) | $0.44/MTok | $0.014 | $1.32/MTok | |
| deepseek-v4-flash (off-peak) | $0.22/MTok | $0.007 | $0.66/MTok | |
| deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp | Same as flash; images billed as input tokens | - | - | Experimental |
Context 1M; max output 384K; thinking default (non-thinking optional); FIM and prefix completion in non-thinking mode. Source: DeepSeek – Pricing
Model Performance / Benchmarks
No new DeepSeek-published benchmark tables in August beyond the GA notes. Standing July figures: V4-Flash-0731: Terminal-Bench 2.1 82.7, DeepSWE 54.4, CyberGym 76.7, "far exceeds V4-Pro-Preview" on agentic tasks. Aggregator coverage of the GA claims V4-Pro-0813 posts the strongest agent-benchmark scores in the family. Sources: DeepSeek – Updates , Local-Ai-Zone – Ai Updates August 2026
Latest News
V4-Pro GA and the End of Flat-Rate DeepSeek (August 2026)
V4-Pro-0813 reached GA on August 12-13, and with it DeepSeek activated time-based pricing and raised effective rates: even off-peak, Pro output costs more than double July's flat $0.87. The supplier that built its brand on being the cheapest frontier API is now roughly 3x more expensive at Beijing business hours, though still far below Western frontier pricing (Opus 5 is $5/$25; Fable 5.1 $10/$50). Sources: DeepSeek – Pricing , Local-Ai-Zone – Ai Updates August 2026
Vision Arrives (Experimentally) (August 2026)
deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp brings image input to the API for the first time, closing a long-standing gap for Claude Code-style agentic workflows that need screenshots. Source: DeepSeek – Vision
Community Signals
No major new HN threads on DeepSeek pricing were found in the August window; the July leaks (Liang Wenfeng's investor meeting, the gigawatt Inner Mongolia data center) remain the standing context for DeepSeek's compute constraints, which the new peak/off-peak pricing indirectly addresses (demand shaping). Sources: News – Item , News – Item
Enterprise Readiness
| Feature | Available? | Details |
|---|---|---|
| SSO (SAML/OIDC) | No | API keys only. |
| SCIM | No | Not applicable. |
| Audit logs | No | Not documented. |
| IP indemnity | No | Not documented. |
| Data residency | No | Single-region inference; no residency options. |
| HIPAA | No | Not advertised. |
| Air-gapped / on-prem | Partial | V4 open weights (GGUF ecosystem) enable self-hosting. Source: GitHub – Deepseek Ai |
| SLA | No | Not published. |
| Admin controls (RBAC) | No | Balance/budget controls only. |
Transparency Gaps
| Gap | Details | Severity |
|---|---|---|
| Price-change communication | The increase from flat to peak/off-peak rates (Pro output +127% off-peak, +355% peak vs July) was applied without a published migration note on the pricing page; the changelog framing is "policy" rather than a price-hike announcement. | High |
| Vision model maturity | "Exp" vision ships without published benchmark scores or a roadmap to Pro-class vision. | Medium |
| Rate-limit tiers | Concurrency caps (500/2,500) are published, but per-token TPM limits remain undocumented. | Medium |
| GA benchmark delta | V4-Pro-0813's "strongest agent scores in the family" claim has no published score table. | Medium |