DeepSeek Slashes Off-Peak Prices by Up to 75% to Balance AI Demand

DeepSeek Slashes Off-Peak Prices to Balance Out AI Demand

(Bloomberg) -- DeepSeek is offering discounts of up to 75% during off-peak hours to reduce spikes in demand for its application programming interface. Starting Wednesday, accessing the DeepSeek V3 model will cost half its usual price from 12:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. Beijing time, while the R1 model that underpins the company's eponymous chatbot will be reduced in price by three quarters. The move comes as the Hangzhou-based artificial intelligence startup grapples with runaway interest and demand from users and developers adopting its technology. Competitors from Tencent Holdings Ltd. to Perplexity AI have started using DeepSeek's models, joining state entities across China, including departments in the Hong Kong government. DeepSeek on Tuesday reopened top-ups for credits to access its API, though it had cautioned that capacity would be constrained during daytime. DeepSeek's reasoning chatbot has upended common preconceptions about the required cost to build robust AI models since its release on Jan. 20. It's been lauded as a rival to OpenAI while requiring a fraction of the development cost. That's sparked a rally in Chinese tech and internet stocks, as investors bet on more upside for those companies even while they're constrained by chip trade curbs from Washington.

DeepSeek Slashes Off-Peak Prices to Balance Out AI Demand

DeepSeek is offering discounts of up to 75% during off-peak hours to reduce spikes in demand for its application programming interface. Starting Wednesday, accessing the DeepSeek V3 model will cost half its usual price from 12:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. Beijing time, while the R1 model that underpins the company's eponymous chatbot will be reduced in price by three quarters.

DeepSeek Offers Steep Off-Peak Discounts to Spread Out Demand | PYMNTS.com

DeepSeek is reportedly offering off-peak hour discounts to ease demand on its services. As Bloomberg News reported Wednesday (Feb. 26), those discounts could reach as high as 75% for users hoping to access the artificial intelligence (AI) company's application programming interface (API). Beginning Wednesday, that report said, access to DeepSeek's V3 model will cost half its normal price during the hours of 12:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. Beijing time. The cost of the company's R1 model -- powering its self-named chatbot -- will be slashed by three-quarters. DeepSeek has been dealing with rampant demand among both users and developers who have adopted its technology. Among them are companies such as Tencent and Perplexity AI, as well as departments within the government of Hong Kong, the report added. The news came one day after DeepSeek resumed allowing top-up credits for API access, while also warning that demand could be strained during busier hours. DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the tech world last month with the launch of its AI chatbot, said to perform on the level of OpenAI's offering at a sliver of the cost. Gokul Naidu, a consultant for SAP, told PYMNTS soon after the launch that DeepSeek was not only a new AI model but "a wake-up call for the entire AI industry." "It challenges entrenched assumptions about the cost of innovation and offers a path forward where cutting-edge technology is both affordable and sustainable," Naidu said. "As we move deeper into 2025, the conversation around AI is no longer just about power -- it's about power at the right price. And in this race, DeepSeek might just have redefined the finish line." Last week saw reports that the company -- backed by a Chinese hedge fund -- was for the first time considering raising outside funding. As a report by the Information noted, DeepSeek has aimed to avoid investor pressure to speed the commercialization of its products, and has worried that raising money from China's high-profit investors could impede its efforts to do business in the U.S. However, a surge in use of its chatbot has driven a need for more AI chips and servers, prompting the company to consider outside funding, that report added.

China's Deepseek cuts off-peak pricing by up to 75%

BEIJING, Feb 26 (Reuters) - Chinese AI startup DeepSeek said on Wednesday that between 1630 GMT and 0030 GMT, the cost of using its API, a platform that allows developers of other apps and web products to integrate its AI models, would be up to 75% cheaper. Usage costs during this timeframe for the API of the hit R1 and V3 models would be 75% and 50% cheaper, respectively, according to the Hangzhou-based company. Reporting by Eduardo Baptista, Editing by Louise Heavens Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence

DeepSeek Offers 75% Discount on its Reasoning Model; New R2 Model to Release Before May

There's more -- the company launched its third open source repository in the 'open source week'. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup, announced on Wednesday that it will offer discounts for its API platform during non-peak hours - from 16:30 - 00:30 every day. During this off-peak period, the cost for DeepSeek-V3 is reduced by 50% to $0.035 per million tokens for input (cache hit), $0.135 for input (cache miss), and $0.550 for output. Meanwhile, DeepSeek-R1 sees a 75% reduction, with prices dropping to $0.035 per million tokens for input (cache hit), $0.135 for input (cache miss), and $0.550 for output. In comparison, OpenAI's o1 reasoning model charges $60 for output and $15 for 1 million input API tokens. That said, DeepSeek's API recently encountered a series of problems. At one point, its status indicated that it experienced downtime for 10 continuous days. On February 6, it was also reported that DeepSeek temporarily suspended API top-ups for developers. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that DeepSeek plans to release its next reasoning model, the DeepSeek R2, 'as early as possible'. The company initially planned to release it in early May but is now considering an earlier timeline. The model is said to produce 'better coding' and reason in languages beyond English. The competition in China's AI ecosystem is heating up, and recently, Alibaba introduced a preview of the Qwen QwQ-Max reasoning model, and the company also committed to a $52 billion investment in AI infrastructure over the next three years. Besides its plans to release new models, DeepSeek is keen to open-sourcing its technologies. The startup announced an open-source week, where it will release five new open source repositories. On Wednesday, the company announced its third release called DeepGEMM, an FP8 GEMM library optimised for dense and Mixture of Experts (MoE) computations. The library is said to deliver more than 1350 FP8 TFLOPS on NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. Recently, the startup released its DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3 models, creating a storm across the AI ecosystem. These models offered state-of-the-art performance while being trained and deployed at a fraction of the cost of their competitors while also being available as open source.