DeepSeek price history
Prices have not only gone down. The direction changed in August 2026.
Why this page exists: DeepSeek has changed prices at least five times in two
years, and press coverage often cites outdated figures. One May article described a 75% cut while the
August announcement was a price increase. Always check the date.
Timeline
| Date | Event | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| 2024-05 | V2 price cut | Input 1 CNY, output 2 CNY per million tokens — the opening shot in China's price war |
| 2024-06 | Industry follows | ByteDance, Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and iFlytek cut prices; some went free |
| 2025-02 | R1 surge, capacity crunch | Top-ups paused; off-peak discount introduced (V3 half price, R1 quarter price, 00:30–08:30) |
| 2025 mid | V3.1 launch | Off-peak discount withdrawn, citing expanded capacity |
| 2026-06-29 | Peak-hour pricing announced | Weekday peak hours charged at 2x once V4 officially launched |
| 2026-08-06 | Blanket increase announced | Notice warned of a "significant" increase |
| 2026-08-17 | V4 Pro goes GA | Pricing adjusted with general availability |
| 2026-10-31 | Super-Agent open-sourced | MIT licensed; pushes agent token consumption higher |
Current structure
Since June 2026 pricing is time-of-day based rather than flat:
| Period | UTC | Beijing | Multiplier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peak | 01:00–04:00, 06:00–10:00 (Mon–Fri) | 09:00–12:00, 14:00–18:00 | 2.0x |
| Off-peak | All other hours | All other hours | 1.0x |
Converted to Beijing time, peak hours cover the Chinese working day. That is intentional: it pushes load away from business hours.
Why the direction reversed
- Agents multiplied token consumption. Agent-style requests use roughly 15x the tokens of human-driven requests, so cheap prices attracted enormous volume.
- Low prices did not mean healthy revenue. Reported annualised revenue is in the low hundreds of millions of dollars, against a valuation many times larger.
- Open weights limit how far prices can rise. Users can switch to third-party providers or self-host, which caps increases.
What to do about it
| Situation | Response |
|---|---|
| Peak hours cost double | Move batch jobs to night or weekends |
| Official prices rose | Compare providers — the same model can differ 18x |
| Volume is large | Run the build-vs-buy numbers |
Related
Current prices · Off-peak guide · Provider comparison · Global price table
Compiled from public sources. Current pricing is governed by DeepSeek's official docs.