deepseek-v4-flash price up to 150% rise on 2026-08-16
On 2026-08-16, DeepSeek changed the published API price of deepseek-v4-flash. The superseded price had stood for 114 days. This is the only recorded price change for this model in the index.
The published price of deepseek-v4-flash rose that day. A rise is the direction that shows up in your bill before it shows up in your planning, and a rise applied retroactively by a current-price table is the version that makes you distrust your own budget.
What changed
| Per 1M tokens | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.14 | $0.22 | +57.1% |
| Output | $0.28 | $0.66 | +135.7% |
| Cache read | $0.003 | $0.007 | +150% |
What it meant in practice
On a reference workload of 50M input and 5M output tokens a month, this change moved the bill from $8.40 to $14.30 a month, a difference of $5.90. The workload is a fixed reference used on every event page so the figures are comparable between them, not a measurement of anyone's usage.
Your recorded history should not change when prices do
A cost tracker carrying a single current-price table would reprice every deepseek-v4-flash session you ran before 2026-08-16 at the new rate, silently restating months you already paid for. See what this change does to a real session, and why dated windows are the fix.
Provenance
Every value here carries a first-party source, and superseded prices are kept rather than overwritten. Windows before the index began are reconstructed from web archives and labelled as archived rather than claimed as first-party.
| Window | Source |
|---|---|
| Input, 2026-04-24 to 2026-08-16 | https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing |
| Input, from 2026-08-16 | https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/ |
| Output, 2026-04-24 to 2026-08-16 | https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing |
| Output, from 2026-08-16 | https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/ |
| Cache read, 2026-07-31 to 2026-08-16 | https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing |
| Cache read, from 2026-08-16 | https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/ |
Related
Derived from the AI Price Index, last updated 2026-08-17. Licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse this with credit to the dataset page.