DeepSeek ships V4.1-Flash and prices off-peak at half rate
DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash on 10 September, described in its own notes as the smallest model in the new architecture family, with native visual understanding and a 552-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts design. The release states that off-peak rates are 50% of peak rates, and claims the model's cache needs roughly a quarter of the HBM. Weights went out publicly rather than behind an API only.
Two levers most buyers ignore. First, time-of-day pricing: if you run anything scheduled — nightly summaries, batch transcription, a report that doesn't need to exist by 9am — running it off-peak is now a real discount rather than a rounding error. Second, open weights mean the same model can be run somewhere else, which is the argument for the local tools in our new Local & open models category.