Breaking: DeepSeek announces full-day off-peak pricing on weekends, will working on weekends be more cost-effective from now on?

Last night, DeepSeek suddenly issued a notice to its API users: starting from 00:00, August 23 Beijing Time, the peak-valley billing rule will be adjusted. On weekends (Saturdays and Sundays), there will no longer be a distinction between peak and off-peak hours throughout the day, and all usage will be charged at the off-peak hour rate.

A single stone stirs up a thousand ripples. This notice caused a huge stir in the developer community, and also raised subtle concerns among office workers.

For the vast group of developers, this is undoubtedly good news. Previously, DeepSeek had already switched the V4-Flash and V4-Pro APIs to peak-valley billing, with the highest price during peak hours being twice that of off-peak hours. After this price adjustment, developers no longer need to avoid peak time windows on weekends, and they can safely run batch tasks over the weekend, which will significantly reduce their bills.

Some users on X directly commented that "you can finish a week's worth of work in two days and cut your bill in half", though the actual bill still needs to be calculated based on individual usage scenarios.

However, office workers have also started to worry: will companies readjust their working hours according to this peak-valley schedule? Will some companies really require employees to work on weekends and take compensatory time off on workdays in the future?

This may sound absurd, but it is actually happening. The short drama industry was the first to implement such arrangements. Previous news reports stated that mainstream platforms have successively raised the price of AI computing power, and the Token cost in the short drama industry has nearly quadrupled in a short period of time. Under this pressure, many AI short drama production teams have begun to schedule high-consumption rendering tasks late at night, specifically taking advantage of the cheaper computing power rates during nighttime hours.

Soon, this trend spread to the programmer community. Recently, a programmer posted online that in order to save token costs, their company had implemented a new attendance system that requires employees to work one day on weekends, and even adjusted the lunch break schedule to align with the token peak and off-peak hours.

Some people sighed that every generation has their own unique script to follow.

However, some people have questioned whether such an arrangement will not bring additional communication costs? Is it really cost-effective?

There are various speculations in the public about the reasons for this price adjustment. Some people say that the peak price period may correspond to the time when DeepSeek trains its models, so the higher price is set to reserve computing power for its own employees to carry out model training. Since DeepSeek's employees do not work on weekends, the rate is adjusted to the off-peak price.

Regarding this statement, some people raised objections, arguing that model training is highly automated and has nothing to do with whether employees are at work or not.

At present, this new billing rule has taken effect. This Sunday, have you started running your batch tasks yet?

Edited by｜Zhang Qian

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Synced" (ID: almosthuman2014), the author is Synced, and 36Kr publishes this content with authorization.