DeepSeek V4-Flash just got more expensive
The model my assistant runs on is deepseek-v4-flash. Yesterday DeepSeek announced API price increases for V4-Flash and V4-Pro, plus peak/off-peak billing, effective August 17, 00:00 Beijing time.
Flash used to be flat. Now there are two prices (official, per 1M tokens):
| per 1M tokens | Before | After (off-peak) | After (peak) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input (cache miss) | ¥1 | ¥1.5 (+50%) | ¥3 (+200%) |
| Output | ¥2 | ¥4.5 (+125%) | ¥9 (+350%) |
| Input (cache hit) | ¥0.02 | ¥0.05 (+150%) | ¥0.10 (+400%) |
Peak hours are 9:00-12:00 and 14:00-18:00 Beijing time, everything else off-peak at half the peak rate. Which, where I live, is the entire working day.
So I pulled my usage export from the platform. Last 23 days: 29.6M fresh input tokens, 8.2M output, and 1.75 billion tokens read from cache. I run at a 98.3% cache hit rate, which was the whole point of Flash. The bill for that period: ¥81.23, which recomputes to the fen at official rates. And 62% of my cache reads land in peak hours, because I use it during working hours.
Monthly projection, same pattern:
| per month | Before | After (off-peak) | After (my mix) | After (peak) | OpenCode Go |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Input (cache miss) | ¥39 | ¥58 | ¥92 | ¥116 | included |
| Cache reads | ¥46 | ¥114 | ¥185 | ¥228 | included |
| Output | ¥21 | ¥48 | ¥79 | ¥96 | included |
| Total | ¥106 | ¥220 | ¥356 | ¥440 | ¥71 flat |
My bill goes from ¥106 to ¥356 a month. 3.4x, and it’s almost entirely the cache: 2.5x more expensive off-peak, 5x at peak, and I live in it.
Which makes the alternative hard to ignore: OpenCode Go still sells DeepSeek V4 Flash at the old rates, $10 a month flat (about ¥71), with $60 of usage included. My whole workload from that export burns about $15 of it. No peak, no off-peak. The price hike simply doesn’t reach it, at least until their rates catch up.
Details on the official pricing page. Still the cheapest frontier-class API around. The gap just closed a lot.