DeepSeek's V4 price hike splits the market: some follow, some wait, some discount
DeepSeek's new V4 pricing officially went live today: seven hours a day at peak rates, the other 17 at half price.
On day one of the increase, domestic and overseas channels have officially diverged. In China, some providers matched the hike immediately, some are waiting a few days, and some are holding the line. Overseas, plenty of platforms are still cheaper than DeepSeek itself.
Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud: matched right away. Both have synced their official V4 Flash and V4 Pro versions to DeepSeek's new prices, peak and off-peak hours included.
Huawei Cloud and Volcano Engine: waiting a few days. Huawei adjusts on August 20 and draws its own day/night line, with a 30% discount at night. Volcano Engine doesn't hike until August 21, so today it still charges the old prices.
Kuaishou Wanqing and Baidu: sticking to their own pricing. Kuaishou Wanqing's V4 Flash still costs 1 yuan input / 2 yuan output — cheaper than DeepSeek's off-peak rate. Baidu's Token Plan hasn't copied DeepSeek's peak/off-peak pricing either; DeepSeek models at night are still as low as 20% of the original price.
OpenRouter: still running a discount. The V4 Flash page currently shows a 33% discount, at roughly $0.06 input / $0.12 output. But it dynamically switches between providers, so that price can change at any moment.
OpenCode: pay-as-you-go follows the hike, subscriptions take a quota cut. Zen has fully synced DeepSeek's peak/off-peak pricing. Go still costs $5 for the first month, then $10, but V4 Flash's monthly per-model allowance drops from $60 to $15 — a 75% cut. Note that Go's overall monthly cap is still $60; what got cut is the DeepSeek Flash model allowance.
Command Code: no package cuts, just passes the increase to users. Monthly fees and Credits are unchanged, but since DeepSeek is now more expensive, the same Credits cover fewer requests. The company says peak hours get roughly half the usage of off-peak hours.
DeepInfra, RunInfra, GMI Cloud, Novita: overseas low prices continue. V4 Flash is about $0.08/$0.18, $0.13/$0.27, $0.14/$0.28, and $0.14/$0.28 respectively — all flat 24/7 pricing, with no DeepSeek-style peak/off-peak split.
Inside China, the market has split into three camps: instant hike, delayed hike, and hold-the-line pricing. Overseas API platforms are mostly still pushing prices down, while coding agents are starting to absorb the increase through subscription quotas.
Depending on which door you buy from, the price and usage allowance for DeepSeek models can already differ by several times.