As well as the headline in/out changes, people heavily using agentic coding tools will want to note the 6x (off peak) and 12x (peak) increase to cache hit pricing on Pro (since cache hit can easily make up 90%+ of input on long sessions).
DeepSeek was hugely underpricing cache hit pricing before and even after this increase they're still cheaper on that metric than every other provider I'm aware of, but it will put an end to those "I used 1 billion tokens and spent $4" reports.
This now places deepseek flash v4 from DeepSeek themselves at higher prices than openrouter (depending on caching). Will be interesting to see if third party prices remain the same.
It doesn't make any sense unless they are going to exit from inference market. They will be literally one of the costliest option (by output, for flash) if use openrouter as source.
Old DeepSeek Flash 0731 prices have been independently reproduced.[1] The issue is DeepSeek being inundated and not having capacity to serve the demand, hence the price increases to significantly dampen demand. Never mind international demand either--just think about the magnitude of Chinese domestic demand. Prices for anything related to AI or computing in general (mobile phones, cloud data centre hosting, etc) will continue to climb fast as demand for computer chips _far_ exceeds supply. DeepSeek doesn't have an option other than to just work away on improving their technology in the period of time before computer chips once again become a commodity. For example, DeepSeek's cache ratio for their models apparently leads to 1/2 GPU time requirement versus the second best provider.[2]
I pay for Google AI Pro (Bought a year in advance) and Gemini is so bad, I burned through 75% of my five hour allowance trying to get it to fix something.
I pasted the same prompt into OpenCode, set to Deepseek v4 flash free and did it first try.
I'm was going to purchase Opencode GO to try it, but seems my timing is really bad :( hope it doesn't go up too much in Opencode or they find other providers. Bad timing!
If you’re worried about pricing, token.dance might be worth a look. It offers multiple AI models through one OpenAI-compatible API at competitive prices.
So OpenAI cut Luna's price by 5x, DeepSeek increased price by 5x!
If I'm reading the benchmarks right, they now went from being much cheaper than Luna (but twice as slow), to being roughly same price (but twice as slow).
So all else being equal, where I would previously have used DeepSeek, I can just use Luna, and get the same result twice as fast?
(Yeah I know benchmarks are mostly nonsense, but the ones measuring time are real, and it's the most precious resource.)
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.
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.
Not just domestic. They come from other Asian countries as well. Asia is huge with billions of people and their time zones are not so much different from each other.
Makes sense. 60% of the world's population is in Asia and software professionals in Asia are much more likely to prioritize affordable models like DeepSeek over expensive Western ones
This is actually not that great for me on the eastern US since I'm a night owl and do all of my best work during the second peak segment. But I was worried the pricing was going to be much higher than it is. Looks like its still generally cheaper than the other chinese models.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 27.0 ms ] threadDeepSeek was hugely underpricing cache hit pricing before and even after this increase they're still cheaper on that metric than every other provider I'm aware of, but it will put an end to those "I used 1 billion tokens and spent $4" reports.
EDIT: formatting
EDIT2: giving up on the formatting :-/
Right now, they give 4100 credits for Luna and 63 000 for Deepseek on their prepaid plan (both are 2x)
[1] https://nitter.net/thdxr/status/2085377844515922210#m
[2] https://nitter.net/thdxr/status/2087610161636471289#m
I pasted the same prompt into OpenCode, set to Deepseek v4 flash free and did it first try.
I'm was going to purchase Opencode GO to try it, but seems my timing is really bad :( hope it doesn't go up too much in Opencode or they find other providers. Bad timing!
If I'm reading the benchmarks right, they now went from being much cheaper than Luna (but twice as slow), to being roughly same price (but twice as slow).
So all else being equal, where I would previously have used DeepSeek, I can just use Luna, and get the same result twice as fast?
(Yeah I know benchmarks are mostly nonsense, but the ones measuring time are real, and it's the most precious resource.)
https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...
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)