TL;DR (October 20, 2026): The DeepSeek API has two models. deepseek-flash (now DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, released October 17) costs $0.15 input and $0.60 output per million tokens off-peak, and $0.30 and $1.20 at peak. deepseek-v4-pro costs $0.66 and $1.98 off-peak, $1.32 and $3.96 at peak. A cache hit costs about 2% of a miss on Flash ($0.003 off-peak). Peak is 01:00 to 04:00 and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC on weekdays; everything else, including weekends, is half price. The new Search and Fetch APIs cost $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests each, and searches made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex start being billed on October 31 at 16:00 UTC. Rate limits are concurrency caps: 2,500 open requests for Flash, 500 for Pro.
DeepSeek's price sheet is short, but it has three moving parts that most comparisons skip: a peak and off-peak schedule, a cache-hit price that is a small fraction of the normal input price, and, since October 17, a per-request fee for web search. Each of them can change a monthly bill more than the choice between Flash and Pro. This page sets out the current rates, then shows what they mean for a realistic agent workload.
DeepSeek API prices as of October 2026
| Per 1M tokens (USD) | deepseek-flash, off-peak | deepseek-flash, peak | deepseek-v4-pro, off-peak | deepseek-v4-pro, peak |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Input, cache hit | $0.003 | $0.006 | $0.022 | $0.044 |
| Input, cache miss | $0.15 | $0.30 | $0.66 | $1.32 |
| Output | $0.60 | $1.20 | $1.98 | $3.96 |
From DeepSeek's Models and Pricing page, read October 20, 2026.
| deepseek-flash | deepseek-v4-pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Model version | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 | DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 |
| Context length | 1M tokens | 1M tokens |
| Maximum output | 384K tokens | 384K tokens |
| Modes | Thinking (default) and non-thinking | Thinking (default) and non-thinking |
| Vision | Yes | No |
| APIs | OpenAI format, Responses API, Anthropic API | OpenAI format, Responses API, Anthropic API |
| Concurrency limit | 2,500 | 500 |
The model name is deepseek-flash. The older names deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp are still accepted, but those models have been retired: requests to them are served by V4.1-Flash-1017 and billed at the Flash price. DeepSeek also kept V4 Pro on the API after September 14, the date it had been due to end, with billing unchanged.
Peak and off-peak hours
Off-peak rates are exactly half of peak. Peak hours are 01:00 to 04:00 and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC, Monday to Friday, excluding Chinese public holidays. In Beijing time that is 09:00 to 12:00 and 14:00 to 18:00, the Chinese working day. For US users it falls in the evening and overnight; for Europe, the night and the morning. Weekends and Chinese public holidays are off-peak in full.
That is 7 peak hours on each of 5 weekdays, or 35 of the week's 168 hours. About 79% of the week is billed at the lower rate. The flip side is that any job scheduled for the Chinese working day pays double. Batch work, evals and nightly backfills belong outside those windows; interactive traffic from users in Asia will mostly land inside them.
Cache hit vs cache miss
DeepSeek's disk cache is on by default for every account and bills the cached part of a prompt at the hit rate. The matching rule is stricter than most: a request only hits the cache if it fully matches a stored prefix unit, and units are saved at the end of each user input, at the end of each model output, at common prefixes the system detects, and at fixed intervals in long inputs. A conversation that only appends new turns keeps hitting; one that edits anything early in the prompt misses until a new common prefix is stored. On Flash a hit costs $0.003 against $0.15 for a miss off-peak, about 2% of the miss price. On Pro it is $0.022 against $0.66, about 3%. For an agent that resends a long, stable system prompt and conversation on every step, almost all of the input can come from cache, and the input bill nearly disappears. What is left is output, which is not discounted.
There is one isolation rule worth knowing if you serve many end users from one account. If you pass a user_id, DeepSeek uses it to isolate the KV cache per user, as well as for content safety and scheduling. That keeps one customer's cached context away from another's, and it likely means a prefix is not reused across different user_id values, so measure the hit rate before and after you add it.
The new fee: Search and Fetch
On October 17 DeepSeek opened its in-house search engine as two standalone APIs: Search, which returns structured results for a query, and Fetch, which returns one web page as Markdown. Each costs $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests.
The detail that drew attention in r/DeepSeek is the note under the price table. When you use the DeepSeek API through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex, the server-side web tools already call Search and Fetch. Those calls are free today, and per-request billing starts at 00:00 Beijing time on November 1, 2026, which is 16:00 UTC on October 31. If you point a coding agent at the DeepSeek API, your search-heavy sessions get a new line item from that date without any change on your side.
What a month costs: a worked example
Take an agent that runs 10,000 tasks a month. Each task sends 120,000 input tokens (100,000 of them cache hits, 20,000 misses) and produces 4,000 output tokens. Token cost per 10,000 tasks:
| Model and window | Cache hits | Cache misses | Output | Total per 10,000 tasks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flash, off-peak | $3.00 | $30.00 | $24.00 | $57.00 |
| Flash, peak | $6.00 | $60.00 | $48.00 | $114.00 |
| V4 Pro, off-peak | $22.00 | $132.00 | $79.20 | $233.20 |
| V4 Pro, peak | $44.00 | $264.00 | $158.40 | $466.40 |
Now add search. If each task makes three Search calls and two Fetch calls, that is 50,000 requests a month, or $37.50. On Flash off-peak, search adds about two thirds to the token bill. On Pro it is a smaller share, but it is no longer zero. For cheap models, tool calls priced per request can cost as much as the model itself, which is why we meter them as their own unit rather than folding them into tokens.
Two habits change this bill more than the model choice. Keep the prompt prefix stable so the cache hit rate stays high: if the 100,000 cached tokens above were misses instead, Flash off-peak input would rise from $33 to $180 per 10,000 tasks. And schedule batch work for off-peak hours, which halves everything in the table.
Rate limits: concurrency, not requests per minute
DeepSeek does not publish requests-per-minute or tokens-per-minute limits. Each account has a concurrency limit: 2,500 simultaneous requests for deepseek-flash and 500 for deepseek-v4-pro. A request counts from the moment it is sent until the response is complete, and the limit is per account, no matter how many API keys you create. Go over it and you get HTTP 429. Higher concurrency is available through a capacity expansion request, at no extra cost. With an expanded quota, DeepSeek also applies the same per-model limits to each user_id you pass. Requests that have not started inference after 10 minutes are closed by the server.
Because the limit counts open connections, long thinking-mode responses hold a slot for longer. If you hit 429s while far below 2,500 requests per minute, check how many requests are in flight, not how many you send. Whether those 429s count against anything else is covered in does a 429 count against your rate limit.
Billing rules
- Prepaid balance: charges are deducted from your topped-up balance or a granted balance, and DeepSeek uses the granted balance first when you have both.
- Formula: model cost is tokens times price; Search and Fetch are charged per successful request.
- Prices can change: DeepSeek reserves the right to adjust prices and recommends topping up based on actual usage. The peak and off-peak schedule took effect on August 16, 2026, and API prices were reduced with the V4.1 Flash release on September 10.
What changed in October 2026
- October 17: V4.1 Flash was upgraded to DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 on the web, app and API. API pricing and the model name are unchanged; DeepSeek says the new version finishes tasks faster with shorter outputs, which lowers cost per task at the same token price.
- October 17: Search and Fetch opened to all API users at $0.75 per 1,000 calls each.
- October 31, 16:00 UTC: server-side search and fetch calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex start being billed.
For how these prices compare with GPT-6 Luna, Claude and Gemini on the same token mix, see DeepSeek vs GPT-6 Luna; for picking a cheap agent model on quality as well as price, see cheap agentic LLMs compared. Day-to-day price changes across providers are logged in our AI price tracker.
Sources
Read on October 20, 2026: DeepSeek's Models and Pricing page; DeepSeek's Rate Limit and Isolation page, Search and Fetch guide, API change log and the October 17 release note for DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017. The community thread referenced is from r/DeepSeek, October 2026.