DeepSeek quietly retires V4 Pro again, days after reversing course
By Rob Litterst, Co-founder, PricingSaaS
Published
DeepSeek’s pricing page · Change detected
What changed
DeepSeek removed the notice promising continued paid support for its legacy V4 Pro model beyond September 14, 2026, effectively ending the grace period it had granted just over a week earlier. At the same time, it redefined its peak/off-peak billing schedule to treat Chinese public holidays as fully off-peak, widening a discount window that already exempted weekends.
Why it matters
For anyone building on V4 Pro, the practical lesson is that DeepSeek's retirement announcements aren't yet reliable — this is the second attempt in ten days, and the first one didn't survive a week and a half. The bigger question is whether DeepSeek's peak/off-peak billing model has found its final shape: five restructurings in six weeks have moved consistently toward more exceptions (surge pricing, a walkback, a near-doubling, a weekend carve-out, now a holiday carve-out), not fewer. Watch whether the next quarter brings a stable structure or another rewrite.
In context
DeepSeek has touched its pricing five times since announcing peak/off-peak surge pricing on Aug 3, most recently merging its Flash and vision models into a cheaper Flash V4.1 on Sep 14. This latest move quietly undoes a promise made just eight days earlier, when DeepSeek said V4 Pro billing would stay unchanged past Sept 14 — a reversal of a reversal that leaves the model's actual retirement date unclear. The added holiday exemption extends a discount pattern DeepSeek first tried in August, when it exempted weekends from peak pricing, though it remains a minor player in that pattern next to serial discounters like Jobber and Kodekloud. Taken together, this looks less like a settled roadmap than live iteration in public.