deepseek off-peak api rates are half of peak; developers built clocks, then moved the week around happy hour

DeepSeek's API now runs on a clock. Off-peak rates are half of peak rates, and the [5] Models & Pricing page ↗ lists three models at those two rates, all per 1M tokens: deepseek-v4-flash (DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731), deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp (DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp), and deepseek-v4-pro (DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813). The [4] changelog entry dated 2026-08-13 ↗ says the new peak and off-peak prices took effect at 16:00 UTC on August 16, 2026. Two of the three models cost exactly the same amount. One of them can see.

input pricing

output pricing

The schedule is the whole product:

Two footnotes the page keeps for itself. Images sent to the vision model are converted into input tokens derived from their dimensions. And prices may vary, which is a pricing page reserving the right to be a different pricing page later.

The weekend is where it gets interesting. A [7] weekend-pricing PSA on r/DeepSeek ↗ says peak pricing is gone on weekends, attributing an effective time of 00:00 Beijing time on Sunday, August 23, 2026, with off-peak rates all day Saturday and Sunday. The pricing page supports the part that matters — peak hours are weekday-only, everything else is off-peak, off-peak is half. It does not state that effective time. The page described weekdays. The internet named an hour.

Then developers did what developers do, which is build a widget. An independent poster shipped [6] DeepPeak, a VS Code status-bar widget ↗ that tracks peak/off-peak status, model pricing, local time, and the next pricing change. The poster notes it is not affiliated with DeepSeek. It is a clock. Someone built a clock, for money.

what people are saying

Weekends are all off-peak, weekday peak hours are still there, and off-peak is half of peak. — RafaelPradox, [8] on X ↗. The pricing page backs the weekday-only peak hours and the half rate. The exact effective time is his, not DeepSeek's.

Tired of the calculations and checking the world clock. Usage gets planned around peak timing. — LulzTigre, [11] on the weekend PSA ↗

Would rather have occasional lowest-price windows, so the heavy prompts can be saved for them. — MikeX7s, [12] on the weekend PSA ↗

Good move, but unpredictable pricing windows are painful for developers building on an API. — GasSmooth7439, [13] on the weekend PSA ↗

Two people had already solved it, separately, in different editors.

Updated a small HTML-based Deepseek-Clock to reflect the pricing change. — apetersson, [14] on the weekend PSA ↗

Already had a peak-hours plugin for opencode, with a link to the repository. — Frail_Waif, [15] on the DeepPeak post ↗. The linked repository was not opened, so what is in it stays unverified.

Then the discourse arrived at its real question, which was not price.

People are making bespoke peak-timing tools. Have a harness set up cron prompts, so nobody has to remember to check. — guanzo91, [9] on the DeepPeak post ↗

An alert when peak changes could help. Cron prompts are not the fit here. Thanks for the awareness-alert idea. — NoPainNullGain, [10] on the DeepPeak post ↗

That is the argument. Not whether to schedule the work around the price, but whether the machine should nudge you or simply tell you. Neither of them argued with the clock. They are negotiating its ringtone.