The Chinese AI lab that built its brand on aggressive price cuts will charge roughly double per token during two daily peak windows (01:00 04:00 and 06:00 10:00 UTC) when V4 launches in July, while off peak rates stay at the current floor.
For the first time in its history, DeepSeek is raising prices on its flagship model. When V4 officially launches in July 2026, per-token API rates will roughly double during two declared peak windows, 01:00 to 04:00 UTC and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC, across cache-hit input, cache-miss input, and output tokens, while off-peak rates remain unchanged at the existing floor, according to an email the company sent to API customers and relayed by Chinese tech outlet QbitAI.
The framing matters. DeepSeek is positioning the change as load-shaping, a way to shift demand away from congested hours, rather than a blanket rate increase. The price floor that made the lab famous stays intact: any token billed outside the two declared windows will cost the same as it does today. Multiple independent outlets have confirmed receipt of the email and the peak-window structure, and developers on r/DeepSeek and DigitalPhablet have posted screenshots.
The move is a flip from DeepSeek's usual playbook. Every previous flagship launched with a price cut, not a hike. V3, R1, and the V4 preview all arrived with aggressive reductions. The V4 preview, released in April 2026, came in at roughly a quarter of the prior per-token rates and added a permanent cache-hit input discount, according to DeepSeek's own release note. That official pricing page is the floor the off-peak rates will continue to track.
So a doubled rate is a first, but a peak-only doubled rate is a different first than a uniform one. The mechanism is closer to peak-load congestion pricing, the same logic electricity grids have used for decades: charge more when the system is full, less when it is empty, and let users self-schedule. The migration guide published by Verdent, a developer-focused third party, walks API customers through exactly that re-routing logic. CryptoBriefing and KuCoin News frame the move the same way.
If the constraint were philosophy, DeepSeek would not have done this. The publicly posted job listings, reported by QbitAI, tell a more concrete story. In the months around the V4 preview launch, the lab began hiring senior data-center operations and delivery staff, IDC planning and design engineers, and supercomputing cluster R&D engineers. The site named on those postings is Ulanqab, in Inner Mongolia, one of the eight national 'East-data-West-Compute' hub nodes, the government's flagship program for routing compute capacity from the country's power-rich west to its demand-rich east. The pattern suggests an infrastructure build-out is underway, not a pricing experiment.
That fits a binding-constraint story. Frontier-scale inference is now more expensive per useful token at peak than DeepSeek has been willing to publicly price. Doubling rates during eight hours of the day, without touching the other sixteen, is the smallest published move that lets the lab tell the market what those hours actually cost.
Pricing alone would be a thin story if the model itself looked solid. The V4 preview has not, at least not yet. Developers and aggregators have reported a high hallucination rate on some tasks, unstable long-context behavior above the million-token window especially under agent and multi-tool workflows, and a tendency to over-flag normal logic as bugs during code review. Native multimodality is still missing. These are community-level complaints, not company-acknowledged defects, but they show up consistently across developer channels, and they sit alongside the pricing change rather than behind it. A model with visible preview friction now carries a published peak-hour premium.
Three signals will tell readers whether the peak-hour premium stays scoped or creeps wider. First, the official V4 pricing page on api-docs.deepseek.com, which should be updated around the July launch and will lock in the exact per-token numbers; the email and the coverage so far describe them as "roughly doubled," not final. Second, whether off-peak rates drift down, up, or stay flat as the Ulanqab site comes online, which is the cleanest read on whether the binding constraint is genuinely peak-hour capacity or something broader. Third, whether the preview-era complaints, hallucination rate, long-context stability, code-review over-flagging, get acknowledged in the V4 release note or simply persist into the official build.
DeepSeek's identity story was always cheaper. The July move doesn't retire that story; it edits it. The lab is telling the market it can publish the real peak marginal cost of its frontier model in daylight, and it is asking the same developers who pushed the discount culture to start scheduling around it.