DeepSeek's API usage will be billed at off-peak rates on weekends starting at midnight on Sunday, eliminating the previous distinction between peak and off-peak API pricing schedules on Saturdays and Sundays, which could cut costs by half.
The existing peak and off-peak pricing structure will remain unchanged for weekdays, according to DeepSeek's notice. Peak hours are defined as 9:00 to 12:00 and 14:00 to 18:00 Beijing Time, and all other times are considered off-peak periods.
Following the adjustment, developers can reduce their bills by 50 percent over the weekends, as peak hours are priced at twice the off-peak rate.
Earlier, the artificial intelligence company had sharply lifted its API pricing. Adopting a peak and off-peak pricing rule, its flagship model DeepSeek-v4-Pro's API output is priced as high as 27 yuan (HK$31.51) per million tokens at peak hours, while the off-peak output pricing is 13.5 yuan per million tokens.
DeepSeek-V4-Flash also charges 9 yuan per million tokens output for peak periods, compared with the 4.5 yuan per million tokens output in off-peak hours.
This adjustment is intended to give users greater flexibility in planning workload on weekends without worrying about peak-hour costs, DeepSeek said, adding that it will also help the company balance computing capacity across the network and continue providing a more stable, high-quality service.
This year, most of China's leading AI labs and cloud providers have increased their prices, including Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Baidu AI Cloud and Z.AI (2513), or Zhipu AI.
Tencent Cloud has announced price hikes twice, while Zhipu AI has raised its API prices three times within the year.
The average API input and output prices for Chinese large language models rose to 4.9 yuan and 21.9 yuan per million tokens in the second quarter, up about 48 percent and 80 percent respectively from 3.3 yuan and 12.2 yuan in the first quarter of 2025, according to a Morgan Stanley report titled "Intelligence War Over Price War," which compiled official pricing from ByteDance, Alibaba (9988), Baidu, Tencent (0700), MiniMax (0100), Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek.
