A clock for DeepSeek's time-of-day pricing
DeepSeek moved its API rates to time-of-day pricing with the V4 Pro release. The cheap hours cost exactly half of the expensive ones, and the boundaries are fixed in UTC. Anywhere else in the world that means converting in your head every single time, so I built a DeepSeek peak/off-peak pricing clock page that shows which half of the day I'm in right now.
By the way, you can check the clock here.
The page shows whether it's cheap or expensive right now, how long the window lasts, when it flips next in local time, and what both models cost either way. In IST the cheap stretch runs from 3:30 PM to 6:30 AM, with expensive blocks at 6:30–9:30 AM and 11:30 AM–3:30 PM.
I queue my non-urgent jobs during the cheap half and the bill drops by 50%. I've been running V4 Pro as my daily model since an earlier note, so the clock has been earning its keep. The rates come straight from the official pricing page.
Update: Sat Aug 22, 2026
DeepSeek changed the weekend rules barely a week after launching the clock. From 00:00 Beijing time on August 23, 2026, Saturdays and Sundays (Beijing time) are billed at the off-peak rate all day, and the weekday windows stay exactly as they were. In IST the cheap stretch now runs non-stop from Friday 3:30 PM to Monday 6:30 AM. The clock page handles the weekend schedule automatically, so it's still the one URL to keep open.