Interesting to see that peak hours are work hours in China, night in the US and Europe, and also morning in Europe. So Deepseek's customers are mostly domestic.
I'm no expert in pricing economics but once peak/off-peak pricing arrives, it seems like tokens are going to be like electricity or long distance phone minutes where it just becomes a commodity/race to the bottom.
LLMs have other properties that also resemble those of utilities. Andrej Karpathy mentioned some in his Software Is Changing (Again) talk. [1]
Yes. I focus on pricing software and I’m a bit baffled why frontier models are pushing tokens.
It’s a race to the bottom, and the bottom is unlimited use for a flat monthly rate.
Granular pricing (tokens, minutes, etc) is pretty anti-customer generates less revenue than customer value-based subscriptions (why SaaS is such a good business model)
But presumably consumers aren’t where the majority of the spend will be.
Consumers don’t generally get usage-based pricing because of the inconvenience and unpredictability, but B2B SaaS products utilize usage-based pricing all the time.
This is somewhat funny when you realise the data centres are now going to start a process that looks very so slightly like daydreaming. Depending on the time of day they're going to be thinking about different things in a cyclic manner. They're going to be doing things like finishing a hard days work then kicking back to think about tricky math problems.
That’s an interesting thing to think about. Still, it’s important for us to remind ourselves that “looks very slightly like” is not the same as the real thing. The A in AI stands for artificial.
The summary of this paper describes my sentiment in better words than I have:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05868-8
It’s very easy for the average person to mistake linguistic ability and simulated problem solving for intelligence and sentience.
That’s what my KimiClaw has literally been doing
Does the API response include a "service tier" response to indicate whether you paid peak/off-peak for a given request? I like to compute cost for each request, and save it with my results.
There is no relative/percentage increases noted (understandably). Just because i'm lazy: roughly how much more expensive is it to work with v4 flash and v4 pro through the API, compared to before the price increases? Is it 2x, 5x, 10x higher?
# Flash, off-peak
cache-hit 2.5x
cache-miss 1.57x
out 2.36x
cache-hit 5x
cache-miss 3.14x
out 4.71x
Someone made a comparison yesterday, including relative increases, and GPT-5.6 Luna, then later someone also added more OpenAI, Anthropic, K3 and GLM 5.2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286679
Already outdated though I think, as GLM 5.3 is latest now :)
About 2x-2.5x off-peak for Flash, 2x-4x I'd say for Pro (x6 on cache in, the biggest increase throughout the board). And twice as much in peak hours.
So many changes in so little time, that it all makes no sense. Continuous churning. Reminds me of the experience of trying to be on top of the dependencies in a medium-large JS project.
I am a person that buys into a tool or a process and expects it to be part of the life with no major changes through the years (or as long as the need exists). But AI? You buy into something today, not 2 weeks have passed and there's already a large "update" introduced to the conditions or the optimal usage patterns you should be adopting.
It's tiring. Makes all prices and offers feel so unreliable and gets me a bit more disinterested each time they change.
This makes no sense. You want improvements to stop?
These being open, you can keep using the old models indefinitely for as long as there are providers offering them.
With proprietary labs lowering their prices and Deepseek raising theirs over time, wouldn't it possible to extrapolate a graph to look at where the terminal frontier-model million-token-cost asymptotes to?
This is good for other competitors I guess. People rarely calculate the bump in price but the fact that price is increasing might bring them to other vendors.
That's a hefty increase. Flash pricing during peak is now 1.32/M out, compared to the current 0.28/M, which in turn is a quite a bit above the cheapest provider at 0.16/M.
https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...
I wonder if this is enough to push people back onto Luna with their comparative price drop
After the big onshore migrations (startup people migrating to the SV),
The big Covid migrations (startup prople migrating to the countryside),
Will we see the big AI migrations (people travelling to where AI is the cheapest)?
My friend told me the price was higher than the last version. Is that true?
Full table with multipliers from previous prices:
DeepSeek-V4-Flash (off-peak, x2 for peak)
* Cache Hit $0.007 (x2.5)
* Cache Miss $0.22 (x1.5)
* Output $0.66 (x2.25)
DeepSeek-V4-Pro (off-peak, x2 for peak)
* Cache Hit $0.022 (x6)
* Cache Miss $0.66 (x1.5)
* Output $1.98 (x2.25)
Peak Hours: 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC
Effective from: 16:00, August 16, 2026 (UTC)
I wonder whether all the DeepSeek providers will follow suit or are they going to try to stay competitive with the old prices?
DeepSeek’s cache pricing was always 1/10th the competition.
It’s still cheaper than everybody else.
I didn't get the impression that anyone competed with the old prices before.
What do you mean? Most providers on OpenRouter offer the same or lower prices than DeepSeek themselves:
- lower prices on cache miss
- but what matter - is cache hit
even now deepseek's off-peak hours for cache hit (0.007) is lower than other providers (~0.01)
Not that surprised about it. Personally I've seen companies really just go all-in on a single provider, and that has usually been Anthropic. I don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.
Also 6-9pm Pacific I think is (coincidentally) peak so it hits the ‘after work hobbyists’ still, which is I suspect is their current main audience.
Peak Hours: 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC
For European and US customers this is effectively 2x increase. I think i wll keep using both Flash and Pro as before.
EDIT: Misread numbers to believe off-peak kept old prices
~200% increase is marginal to you?
For the price of can of Coke, you can do a week of work. For most, that is not a bottleneck.
200% increase over practically free is still practically free
It mostly hurts people in countries with weak purchasing power. DS was the main game in down for them.
Personally, I don't think we've seen the total end of dirt cheap LLMs, it's just a frontier lab doesn't want to be in business of serving half the world.
That's a bit obvious, isn't it?