On 6 August, DeepSeek said it plans to raise the pricing of its API services overall in the near term, with a substantial increase expected, and advised users to arrange their usage sensibly. Specifics will follow an official notice.
DeepSeek currently runs a peak-and-off-peak schedule. On weekdays, peak hours, Beijing time 09:00 to 12:00 and 14:00 to 18:00, all prices are doubled. Off-peak windows, 00:30 to 08:30, weekends and public holidays, keep the original flat rates.
The move matters because DeepSeek’s open-weight models have been a benchmark for cheap frontier-class inference in China. A broad price rise signals that even the most efficient Chinese labs are feeling the cost of compute and are shifting from growth-at-any-price to monetisation, a change that reshapes the unit economics for every startup built on top of them.
More from the original report
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original LeiPhone report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.