The change will take place as early as next week, but even though the new prices are the quadruple of what has been charged so far, DeepSeek still has the most affordable models on the market.
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14/08/2026
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A DeepSeek was especially known to offer his models of Artificial Intelligence for lower prices than Western competitors but soon this strategy will no longer be in force.
The Chinese company announced that as the launch of the DeepSeek V4 model Pro, the price charged to customers for access to your API will quadruple.
How does the engadget site, DeepSeek will adopt a peak price strategy (more expensive) and off-peak ( cheaper. According to the publication, model V4 Pro will cost $3.96 per 1 million tokens in peak hours – four times more than the current rate of 0.87 cents. As far as the off-peak time is concerned, it'll be $1.98.
The price change will enter into force from August 16th, which means that the change will be felt already next week. DeepSeek justified the decision with the need to “allocate resources more reasonably”.
Despite these price increases, it should be said that DeepSeek continues to have the cheapest access when compared to other Artificial Intelligence companies. OpenAI, for example, charges $30 for a million tokens from its latest model, the GPT-5.6 Sol.
Compared to models from other Chinese companies, Moonshot's Kimi K3 costs $15.