DeepSeek V4 — the V4-Pro and V4-Flash pair that has led the price-performance charts all spring — has technically been a preview since it shipped on April 24, 2026. As of July 16, three things are moving at once: reports of a mid-July stable ("formal") release with time-of-day API pricing, a viral gray-test video the community reads as the stable build, and one fully official deadline — the legacy deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner aliases stop working on July 24, 2026. That last one is not a rumor, and if you still call those model names, you have days to migrate.
Confirmed, reported, rumored
Confirmed (DeepSeek's own documentation):
- V4 Preview shipped April 24, 2026: V4-Pro (1.6T total parameters, 49B active) and V4-Flash (284B total, 13B active), both MIT-licensed open weights with a 1M-token context, up to 384K output tokens, and dual thinking / non-thinking modes.
- The July 24 deadline: the legacy
deepseek-chatanddeepseek-reasoneraliases are retired and become inaccessible after July 24, 2026, 15:59 UTC. Anything still pointed at them breaks that day. - Current official API prices stand at $0.435 input / $0.87 output per million tokens for V4-Pro, and $0.14 / $0.28 (cache hits $0.014) for V4-Flash.
Reported (industry press, not yet in DeepSeek's docs):
- A mid-July stable release for V4, replacing the preview label.
- The interesting part: time-of-day pricing on DeepSeek's own API. Reported peak windows are Beijing time 9:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00, where prices double; outside those windows, today's prices hold.
Rumored (community sightings, unverifiable):
- A viral video claims a gray-test build of the stable V4 generating a playable "Minecraft plus No Man's Sky" game from one prompt — read as evidence the stable build is stronger than the preview. Cherry-picked single prompts prove little; the skeptics' counterexample in the same threads is apt: Gemini 3.1 Pro shipped in February and is still labeled preview. Gray-test sightings are not a release.
- Timing speculation clusters around WAIC (the week of July 17), the same window the Kimi K3 signals point to — see our K3 tracker.
The overseas angle nobody is pricing in
If the peak-pricing report holds, it quietly favors developers outside China. The reported peak windows — 9:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00 Beijing time — translate to 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, which is nighttime in the US and early morning in Europe. A team in San Francisco running its workload at 10am Pacific lands at 17:00–18:00 UTC (1–2am Beijing): deep off-peak, today's prices. Chinese domestic traffic, concentrated in Beijing business hours, would absorb the 2× windows.
In other words: the reported scheme is congestion pricing for DeepSeek's home market, and most overseas workloads would never touch it. Worth knowing before anyone panics about "DeepSeek doubling prices" — that is not what the report says.
What to do this week (regardless of the release)
The actionable item is the confirmed one. If any of your code, tools or agent configs still reference deepseek-chat or deepseek-reasoner, they stop working on July 24. The migration is a rename:
deepseek-chat→ `deepseek-v4-flash` for routine and high-volume work, or `deepseek-v4-pro` where quality matters.deepseek-reasoner→ `deepseek-v4-pro` in thinking mode.
Both V4 models are OpenAI-compatible, so the change really is one string. Our migration guide covers the mechanics, and the DeepSeek pricing explainer has the current numbers in detail.
What changes at the stable release (and what won't)
Judging by every prior DeepSeek release cycle, a stable label mostly formalizes what the preview already does; weights are already MIT-licensed and the API already serves production traffic at scale. The things to actually watch on release day:
- Whether the time-of-day pricing ships as reported, and its exact windows and multipliers.
- Any bump to rate limits or context/output caps that preview status was holding back.
- Fresh official benchmarks — the preview's coding numbers (LiveCodeBench top score for Pro) were already strong; a stable build that moves them would reshuffle the value rankings.
This page gets updated when the release is official.
Run V4 from anywhere, either way
Both V4 models are live on Turiloop — deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-flash behind one OpenAI-compatible key, pay-as-you-go with an international card, no Chinese phone number. Point your SDK at api.turiloop.com/v1 and the July 24 alias retirement never touches you; if the stable build changes anything worth switching for, it will be a model-id change, not a migration. The pricing calculator has both models against every rival tier.
FAQ
Is DeepSeek V4 officially released? The V4 Preview has been public and open-weight since April 24, 2026. A stable ("formal") release is reported for mid-July 2026 but is not yet announced in DeepSeek's documentation as of July 16.
What happens on July 24, 2026? The legacy deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner model aliases are retired at 15:59 UTC and stop responding. This is official. Migrate to deepseek-v4-flash or deepseek-v4-pro before then.
Is DeepSeek doubling its API prices? No — the report says peak-hour pricing: 2× only during Beijing business windows (reported 9:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00 CST), with current prices outside them. For most overseas workloads those windows fall at night. And it remains a report, not an announcement.
What are DeepSeek V4's specs? Confirmed since April: V4-Pro is a 1.6T-parameter MoE (49B active), V4-Flash is 284B (13B active); both carry 1M context, up to 384K output, thinking and non-thinking modes, MIT-licensed weights.
Should I wait for the stable release to adopt V4? No. The preview already serves production traffic, the weights and prices are public, and the alias deadline forces the naming migration by July 24 anyway. Adopt now; the stable label changes little for API users.