What "Half Price Off-Peak" Concealed: DeepSeek Switches V4's API Pricing to Time-of-Day Billing and Hands Out a Sticker Price That's Actually Higher Than Today's
On August 16, DeepSeek shifted its API pricing to a two-tier peak/off-peak structure. Billed as "off-peak half price," the baseline is the new peak rate—compared with current pricing, output runs up to about 4.7x higher. Here's what it means for coding-agent execution costs and how to think about th