DeepSeek Clarifies Off-Peak API Pricing for Adjusted Weekends and Holidays

Summary

DeepSeek’s September 19 pricing clarification says weekends worked as make-up days and Chinese statutory holidays are billed at the API’s off-peak rate for the entire day. This covers September 20 and October 10, when weekends are designated as workdays, as well as the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday from September 25–27 and National Day holiday from October 1–7. Under DeepSeek’s earlier pricing schedule, weekday peak periods are 9:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00, at twice the off-peak rate; weekends had already been priced at the off-peak rate all day. The clarification resolves whether a weekend make-up workday should count as a weekday or weekend for billing: it remains a weekend for pricing purposes. From September 20 through October 10, the listed holiday and weekend dates therefore provide more than ten days at off-peak prices. The article also notes that V4.1Flash, released September 10, is a 552-billion-parameter MoE model that activates 8 billion parameters on input and 16 billion on output. It reportedly outperformed DeepSeek’s V4Pro flagship on several benchmarks while retaining Flash-tier pricing. At off-peak rates, cached-input tokens cost 0.02 yuan per million and output tokens cost 4 yuan per million.