DeepSeek warns of a 'significant' API price increase ahead
DeepSeek's Models & Pricing docs now carry a footnote warning of a coming, unspecified 'significant' overall price increase for its API; current per-token rates are unchanged as of this capture.
No advance-notice language beyond the standard 'prices may vary' disclaimer
New footnote: DeepSeek 'plan[s] to raise the overall pricing for DeepSeek API services in the near future, with a significant increase expected... subject to official notice'
Proof of change
DeepSeek's pricing pages, as we captured them on two dates.
Showing the whole page as captured — scroll either panel, or open it at full size.
- These prices come from our capture alone — they were not confirmed against an independent second source.
Both images are our own captures, taken on the dates shown. The pixels are unmodified — nothing is retouched, and where a region is highlighted the marker is drawn over the image, not into it. Open either capture to see it at full resolution.
DeepSeek’s api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing page added a second pricing footnote this week, distinct from its long-standing generic “prices may vary” disclaimer: “We plan to raise the overall pricing for DeepSeek API services in the near future, with a significant increase expected. Please plan your usage accordingly. The specific pricing plan will be subject to official notice.” No dollar amount, affected model, or effective date has been published — DeepSeek-V4-Flash ($0.14/$0.0028/$0.28 per 1M for cache-miss input / cache-hit input / output) and DeepSeek-V4-Pro ($0.435/$0.003625/$0.87) rates are unchanged in this capture.
The same page also quietly added a Responses API endpoint for DeepSeek-V4-Flash only (DeepSeek-V4-Pro support is slated for “early August 2026”), and the model build tag moved to DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731. The notice lands roughly a month after Bloomberg and Reuters reported DeepSeek preparing an IPO filing and a raise at a ~$74B valuation — DeepSeek’s per-token API rates have anchored the industry’s price floor since 2024, and this is the first explicit signal that floor may be moving up rather than down.
DeepSeek replaced its vague "significant price increase" footnote with a concrete time-of-use rate card: peak-hour rates (01:00-04:00 and 06:00-10:00 UTC) roughly 3-11x current per-token prices depending on the line item, with off-peak rates at half of peak, effective 16:00 UTC on 2026-08-16. V4-Flash cache-miss input moves from a flat $0.14 to $0.22 off-peak / $0.44 peak; V4-Pro cache-miss input moves from a flat $0.435 to $0.66 off-peak / $1.32 peak. DeepSeek-V4-Pro also picked up a dated build suffix (-0813) and gained Responses API support, reaching feature parity with V4-Flash.