DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Off-Peak Pricing as a Cheap Fallback Model

Melvin Vivas · X post · 2026-09-13 · Open on X

Topics: LLMOps, Deployment & Monitoring, LLM Fundamentals · Level: beginner

Summary

The creator calls DeepSeek V4.1 Flash good and very cheap, and suggests it as a fallback when other usage limits run out. The quoted post gives off-peak per-token prices, a speed of about 299 tokens/s, and the off-peak hours in Singapore time.

Key points

• Off-peak prices: $0.003 per 1M cached input tokens, $0.15 per 1M uncached input tokens, $0.60 per 1M output tokens.
• Average speed of about 299 tokens/s.
• Cached input is about 50x cheaper than uncached, so reuse prompt prefixes.
• Off-peak hours (Singapore time): before 9AM, 12–2PM and after 6PM on weekdays, plus all day Saturday and Sunday.
• Use it as a fallback model when your main tool's limits run out.

Resources mentioned

• DeepSeek V4.1 Flash · tool · api-docs.deepseek.com · paid
  A fast DeepSeek language model available through DeepSeek's official API.
  Also in: Using Hugging Face credits: Jobs, Inference Endpoints and Open Models (Melvin Vivas on X · notes), DeepSeek 4.1 Flash speed on the official API: about 325 tokens/s (Melvin Vivas on X · notes), One-Shot Agent Management UI with DeepSeek Harness for $0.19 (Melvin Vivas on X · notes), DeepSeek Harness: Open-Source, Browser-Based Agent for DeepSeek V4.1 (Melvin Vivas on X · notes) and 1 more

Try this

• Schedule heavy DeepSeek API workloads during off-peak hours.
• Design prompts to get cache hits on input tokens.