Posts in the AI Pricing Watch series
DeepSeek V4-Pro peak Output jumped from $0.87 to $3.96/1M tokens (↑355%), V4-Flash from $0.28 to $1.32 (↑371%), effective 2026-08-16 16:00 UTC. Off-peak rates are half of peak (peak hours: 01:00-04:00 and 06:00-10:00 UTC). Post-hike prices still undercut GPT-5.6 and Claude, but the low-cost moat has narrowed significantly.
Claude Sonnet 5 was set to jump from its promo price of $2/$10 to $3/$15 on 9/1. On 8/10 Anthropic updated its pricing page to confirm the increase 'will not happen' — $2/$10 is now the permanent price. For a workload of 300K customer-service conversations per month, that avoids a $1,200/month cost increase (↓33%), and means Sonnet 5 is now permanently cheaper than its predecessor Sonnet 4.6 ($3/$15).
GPT-5.6 Sol standard rates through OpenRouter and Cloudflare AI Gateway drop from $5.00/$30.00 to $2.50/$15.00 per million tokens (input/output, -50%); Flex goes as low as $1.25/$7.50. Promo runs through 2026-09-18. Discount applies only to platform-managed billing (Unified Billing / non-BYOK) traffic — OpenAI's own API pricing is unchanged.
OpenAI officially lowered GPT-5.6 Sol standard rates from $5.00/$30.00 to $4.00/$20.00 per million tokens (input/output; input ↓20%, output ↓33%), effective 2026-08-21, promotional period at least through 11/21. This is OpenAI's own price cut — not an OpenRouter/Cloudflare-style platform promo (see previous post). The two now stack: OpenRouter's 50% discount applies on top of the new $4/$20 base, yielding $2.00/$10.00.
Google Cloud added Flexible Savings Plans for Gemini Enterprise (spend-based monthly commitment, 10% off for 1-year, 20% off for 3-year, no minimum or maximum), a new pay-as-you-go consumption edition, and an upcoming off-peak batch processing option (up to 50% off inference cost), effective 2026-08-26. Unlike OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol sticker-price cut, this doesn't touch list prices at all — it's a whole new billing toolkit. Where OpenAI is fighting a price war, Google is fighting a FinOps-governance war.
Effective 2026-08-23 00:00 Beijing time, DeepSeek no longer distinguishes peak from off-peak hours on Saturdays and Sundays — the entire weekend now bills at the off-peak rate. Previously, weekends followed the same schedule as weekdays, with V4-Pro output costing $3.96/1M tokens during peak windows; now weekends are $1.98/1M all day. Weekday billing is unchanged. This lands just one week after the 8/16 peak-hour price hike (output up 355%-371%).
OpenAI's Assistants API (/v1/assistants, /v1/threads, /v1/threads/runs) officially sunset on 2026-08-26 — announced a year in advance, zero grace period, no automated migration tool. This isn't a pricing change on its own, but the forced migration also forces a model choice: workloads that ran on o3 ($2.00/$8.00 per million input/output tokens) via Assistants have no direct successor. OpenAI's official recommendation is GPT-5.6 Sol ($4.00/$20.00, cost ↑129%), but Terra ($2.00/$12.00, ↑29%) is often good enough in practice — a 44% gap between the two paths.