What DeepSeek costs: about as close to free as AI gets.
DeepSeek's whole pitch is price. Here is the honest breakdown — what is free, what the API actually costs, and the discounts that make a real workload almost free.
01Free where it counts
The chat app and website are free. The API is paid but priced far below the frontier, and new accounts usually get a free starter grant of tokens to build with before you spend anything.
02API pricing, in plain terms
You pay per token, split into input and output, with Flash dramatically cheaper than Pro. The numbers are small enough that for most personal and small-team use, a month of real work costs a few dollars — sometimes cents. Always check DeepSeek's current rate card before relying on a figure.
As of August 13, 2026, the flagship deepseek-v4-pro endpoint — now serving the general-availability V4 Pro 0813 build that left preview on August 13 — lists these rates per million tokens:
V4 Pro list rates, per million tokens
- Input, cache miss: $0.435
- Input, cache hit: $0.003625
- Output: $0.87
Read those first two rows again: a cache hit costs about 1/120th of a cache miss. That is not a rounding difference, it is the whole game — which is why the section below is the one that actually decides your bill. The endpoint carries a 1M-token context window and a 384K-token maximum output.
Context caching. When your prompts share a repeated prefix (a system prompt, a long document), cached tokens are billed at a fraction of the normal price. For repetitive workloads this alone can cut the bill by most of it.
03The price rise now has a date and a number
The warning that used to sit on DeepSeek's rate card has resolved. Alongside the V4 Pro general-availability release, DeepSeek published a new card that replaces flat pricing with peak and off-peak billing, off-peak set at half the peak rate. It takes effect at 16:00 UTC on August 16, 2026. Peak hours are 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC; every other hour is off-peak.
V4 Pro from August 16 — per million tokens (off-peak / peak)
- Input, cache miss: $0.66 / $1.32 (was a flat $0.435)
- Input, cache hit: $0.022 / $0.044 (was a flat $0.003625)
- Output: $1.98 / $3.96 (was a flat $0.87)
V4 Flash from August 16 — per million tokens (off-peak / peak)
- Input, cache miss: $0.22 / $0.44 (was $0.14)
- Input, cache hit: $0.007 / $0.014 (was $0.0028)
- Output: $0.66 / $1.32 (was $0.28)
Do the arithmetic before you shrug. V4 Pro output goes up 2.3× off-peak and 4.6× at peak. The cache-hit rate — the one section 02 called the whole game — rises about 6× off-peak and 12× at peak. Caching is still a huge win (a hit is now roughly 1/30th of a miss) but noticeably less huge than the 1/120th it was.
Peak is only seven hours out of twenty-four, and those hours sit in the small hours of the US morning. If your workload is batch — nightly summarisation, backfills, evals, anything with no human waiting — moving it outside 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC halves the token bill for the price of editing one cron line. Interactive traffic from US or European users mostly lands off-peak already.
04September 10, 2026: Flash gets cheaper again — and a new name
Three weeks after the peak/off-peak card landed, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and cut the Flash rates with it. The API model name is now simply deepseek-flash; the old deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp names still resolve, but they are served by V4.1 Flash and billed at the Flash price. The rate card as published on the day:
V4.1 Flash from September 10 — per million tokens (off-peak / peak)
- Input, cache miss: $0.15 / $0.30 (was $0.22 / $0.44)
- Input, cache hit: $0.003 / $0.006 (was $0.007 / $0.014)
- Output: $0.60 / $1.20 (was $0.66 / $1.32)
That is roughly a third off input on a miss, more than half off a cache hit, and 10% off output — and the new Flash reads images natively, which V4 Pro does not. The cache-hit ratio is back to about 1/50th of a miss, so the “caching is the whole game” advice in section 02 gets stronger, not weaker. Peak hours are unchanged.
DeepSeek had signalled that V4 Pro API service would end after September 14, 2026. On September 10 it reversed that: deepseek-v4-pro continues “in response to user demand,” at the same $0.66 / $1.32 input, $0.022 / $0.044 cache-hit and $1.98 / $3.96 output rates listed above. If you had a migration deadline in your calendar for the 14th, delete it — but read Flash vs Pro before you decide Pro is still worth 4× the price, because on DeepSeek’s own benchmarks the new Flash now beats it on most agent and coding work.