Top-tier reasoning at a small fraction of frontier prices — now billed on a peak/off-peak schedule, DeepSeek's first time-of-day pricing.
DeepSeek V4-Pro reached general availability on August 13, 2026 (build V4-Pro-0813), adding selectable low/high/max thinking-effort levels and native Responses API support after months in preview. Three days later, on August 16, DeepSeek introduced its first time-of-day pricing: a peak window from 16:00 to 00:30 UTC now bills exactly double the off-peak rate. Off-peak, V4-Pro runs $0.66 input / $1.98 output per 1M tokens — up from the flat $0.435/$0.87 it charged before the change. At peak, that becomes $1.32/$3.96.
Even at the new peak rate, V4-Pro remains far cheaper than western frontier models, but the gap has narrowed and the pricing is no longer a single flat number — budget around the daily peak window if usage volume matters. The honest counterweights are unchanged: DeepSeek is a Chinese company hosting in China, and data residency is a real consideration for regulated western enterprises. Open weights mitigate this since V4-Pro can be self-hosted by anyone with the GPUs.
V4-Pro is strongest at math, logic, and chain-of-thought reasoning, which has been DeepSeek's calling card since R1 in early 2025. The Aug 13 GA release added selectable thinking-effort levels (low/high/max), letting callers trade latency and cost against reasoning depth. Coding is competitive with GPT-5.4 on most public benchmarks, especially on algorithmic and competition-style problems.
Where it trails the western frontier: nuanced writing voice, tool-use polish, and instruction-following on edge cases. UX around the API (rate limits, observability, SLAs) is also less mature than OpenAI or Anthropic — and now comes with a peak-hour billing schedule to track.
| Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4-Pro (off-peak) | $0.66 | $1.98 | 1M |
| DeepSeek V4-Pro (peak) | $1.32 | $3.96 | 1M |
| DeepSeek V4-Flash (off-peak) | $0.22 | $0.66 | 1M |
| Gemini 3.6 Flash | $0.75 | $3.75 | 1M |
| GPT-5.5 | $5 | $30 | 1M |
Even at peak pricing, V4-Pro undercuts GPT-5.5 by a wide margin. Off-peak, it now lands close to Gemini 3.6 Flash's intro price rather than clearly under it — the first time a DeepSeek flagship hasn't been the unambiguous budget leader in this comparison. V4-Flash remains the cheapest reasoning option on the ledger at either time of day.