{
  "id": 1187611,
  "title": "DeepSeek Now Prices Tokens Like Electricity: 50% Off-Peak Discount and a Spring Boot Pattern to Profit From It",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/16/deepseek-now-prices-tokens-like-electricity-50-off-peak-discount-and",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-08-16T03:12:15.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/jamilxt/deepseek-now-prices-tokens-like-electricity-50-off-peak-discount-and-a-spring-boot-pattern-to-1j7g"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "DeepSeek has introduced peak and off-peak pricing for its tokens, with off-peak rates being 50% lower than peak. This change took effect on August 16, 2026 at 16:00 UTC. The pricing table shows that off-peak rates are 17 out of the 24 hours in a day, while peak hours are limited to early morning and midday UTC. DeepSeek offers three models: V4 Flash and V4 Pro, with varying pricing based on input and output token rates. Off-peak pricing is significantly cheaper than peak pricing for all models, except for cache hits, which have a 6x to 12x increase during peak hours. The article suggests that developers can shift their workloads to off-peak hours to save on costs, especially for batch processing tasks and interactive chat. A cost-aware scheduling layer can be implemented to determine the best time for different types of workloads, allowing developers to optimize their costs based on the time of day.",
  "summary": "Three days ago I knew exactly what a DeepSeek call cost me. I had wired DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 into a Spring Boot app with Spring AI, and the math was simple: $0.435 per million input tokens, $0.87 per million output tokens, and a cache-hit rate so aggressive that long agent sessions stayed embarrassingly cheap ( I wrote up the integration ). Then the pricing update landed, and tokens suddenly have…",
  "key_points": [
    "DeepSeek introduces off-peak pricing at 50% discount from August 16, 2026",
    "Off-peak rates available 17 hours daily, peak limited to early morning and midday UTC",
    "Developers can optimize costs by shifting workloads to off-peak hours"
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}