Your api bill now depends on the chinese holiday calendar. deepseek's updated peak-valley rules,…
your api bill now depends on the chinese holiday calendar. deepseek's updated peak-valley rules, announced september 21, charge off-peak rates all day on statutory holidays and adjusted work weekends, after weekends went off-peak earlier.
the cheapest inference runs when the market is closed.
Context
AIBase, 20 September 2026, says DeepSeek on 19 September released a supplementary explanation that weekends with adjusted workdays and national holidays in China are billed at off-peak rates, listing 20 September, 10 October, Mid-Autumn and National Day, and that the whole weekend was already off-peak. DeepSeek's API pricing docs say off-peak rates are half of peak and that peak hours are 01:00 to 04:00 and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC, Monday through Friday; the footnote read does not mention holidays or adjusted workdays. A Bloomberg item of 22 August 2026 reports DeepSeek ended weekend peak pricing from 23 August.
The holiday and adjusted workday rule has secondary support only, and the current docs footnote is silent on it. The sources put DeepSeek's clarification on 19 September with coverage on 20 September, so announced September 21 is the note's own post date and is not supported as the announcement date. Weekends going off-peak earlier is supported by the Bloomberg snippet and AIBase. The UTC peak hours convert to 09:00 to 12:00 and 14:00 to 18:00 China time by simple arithmetic. The bill follows a Chinese holiday calendar is the author's framing.
Watch next
- DeepSeek's first-party announcement of the holiday rule with its date, and the docs footnote once it names holidays.
Sources
- DeepSeek holiday off-peak clarification (AIBase, 20 Sep 2026)news.aibase.com
- Models and pricing (DeepSeek API docs)api-docs.deepseek.com
- DeepSeek ends weekend peak pricing (Bloomberg, 22 Aug 2026)bloomberg.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 21 September 2026 at 09:48 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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