❯ DeepSeek Adjusts API Billing — Entire Weekend Now Billed at Off-Peak Rate

PRICINGAs of 00:00 on August 23 Beijing time, DeepSeek has adjusted its API billing rules: Monday through Friday still uses the original peak/off-peak tiered pricing, while Saturday and Sunday no longer distinguish peak from off-peak, with all hours uniformly billed at the off-peak rate.

PEAK/OFF-PEAKThe peak/off-peak pricing itself only launched on August 17, with peak windows set at 9:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00 on weekdays, and the off-peak rate set at half the peak rate. In other words, a mechanism that has been running for less than a week has already loosened one of its seams. The official line is that this lets users schedule weekend tasks without worrying about time-of-day costs, while also balancing compute load across the network. Under the previous rules, the off-peak rate was just 50% of the peak rate — the entire weekend now effectively lands on that line.

STAKESNet result: weekend batch inference costs are cut in half. Teams running offline evals, batch data synthesis, and overnight agent jobs now have a solid cost-saving window. What’s even more worth pondering is the scale of compute sitting idle on weekends — the willingness to accept half price in exchange for filling that load suggests the gap between peak and off-peak is wider than the pricing sheet implies.

▪ SIGNALWhere the pricing sheet loosens is usually where overcapacity first surfaces.