DeepSeek spent the first half of 2026 being the disruptor that made every other AI company sweat. Now it’s joining the club it once threatened to blow up.
The Chinese AI startup announced on August 6 that it will significantly raise API prices across its V4 model lineup, implementing a new peak and off-peak billing structure starting August 16. The most striking number: the V4-Pro model’s output token price during peak hours will climb to $3.96 per million tokens, up from the current $0.87. That’s roughly a 4.5x increase on the output side alone.
From price slasher to price matcher
To understand why this matters, rewind a few months. In May 2026, DeepSeek made a permanent 75% price cut on its V4-Pro model, a move that sent shockwaves through China’s AI industry and rattled Western competitors.
The current rates tell the story of just how aggressively DeepSeek had been pricing. V4-Flash sits at $0.14 per million uncached input tokens and $0.28 for output tokens. V4-Pro runs $0.435 for input and $0.87 for output.
