DeepSeek V4 Flash pricing update
Update — September 11, 2026
DeepSeek’s current prices are lower than the August rates in this post (official, per 1M tokens):
Off-peak Peak Input (cache miss) ¥1 ¥2 Output ¥4 ¥8 Input (cache hit) ¥0.02 ¥0.04 Using the same verified 23-day export and peak-hour pattern, my projected monthly bill is now:
per month Before August Current off-peak Current mix Current peak Input (cache miss) ¥39 ¥39 ¥61 ¥77 Cache reads ¥46 ¥46 ¥74 ¥91 Output ¥21 ¥43 ¥70 ¥85 Total ¥106 ¥127 ¥205 ¥254 So it comes out to about ¥205/month, down from the August estimate of ¥356. It is still roughly double the old ¥106/month.
The rest of this post is the August 14 snapshot.
On August 13, 2026, 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.
At the August rates, the monthly projection was:
| per month | Before | After (off-peak) | After (my mix) | After (peak) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Input (cache miss) | ¥39 | ¥58 | ¥92 | ¥116 |
| Cache reads | ¥46 | ¥114 | ¥185 | ¥228 |
| Output | ¥21 | ¥48 | ¥79 | ¥96 |
| Total | ¥106 | ¥220 | ¥356 | ¥440 |
At those August prices, my bill would have gone 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.
The official pricing page has the current rates.