DeepSeek's new API prices land August 16, and off-peak is not a way back to today's rates

DeepSeek promoted V4-Pro to general availability and, in the same post, announced that API billing moves to peak and off-peak rates at 16:00 UTC on August 16. Off-peak is exactly half of peak. Peak hours are 01:00 to 04:00 and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC, and everything else is off-peak. The company's stated reason, from its own changelog, is "to allocate resources more reasonably."

The figures are published on DeepSeek's pricing page. For deepseek-v4-pro, output per million tokens goes from $0.87 today to $1.98 off-peak and $3.96 at peak. Cache-hit input goes from $0.003625 to $0.022 off-peak and $0.044 at peak, which is 6.1x and 12.1x. For deepseek-v4-flash, output goes from $0.28 to $0.66 and $1.32; cache-hit input goes from $0.0028 to $0.007 and $0.014. Every single rate in the new off-peak column sits above the rate in force today.

Why it matters: Agent loops are cache-hit heavy by construction. A long, stable prefix of system prompt, tool schemas and conversation history gets re-sent every turn, and that is the line item rising fastest here, up to 12.1x on V4-Pro. Anyone whose factory economics assumed DeepSeek as the cheap backend has two days to redo the arithmetic, and moving work into off-peak hours does not undo the increase. It halves it.