The AI Price-Hike Exit Kit — the Full Before/After DeepSeek Price Table, the US Peak-Hour Clock Rule, the One-Minute Bill Check, and the Three Verified Exit Lanes

The companion to the video. On August 16, 2026 at 16:00 UTC, DeepSeek — the cheapest AI API in the world — moved every price up: +52% on the gentlest line, +1,114% on the steepest (Pro cached input at peak). This kit is everything we verified on the official pages the morning it happened. PAGE 2 — THE COMPLETE BEFORE/AFTER TABLE from DeepSeek's own docs, captured while the page still showed both price sheets: every line, both models (V4-Flash and V4-Pro), with the honest percentage increase on each — plus DeepSeek's own changelog wording and the Bloomberg IPO context. PAGE 3 — THE CLOCK RULE: peak is 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, off-peak is exactly half, 17 hours a day. Translated to US time: a normal 9-to-5 runs entirely off-peak, but the 9pm–midnight Eastern side-project window (and 2–6am cron window) pays double — with the scheduling rule that halves every heavy run for free. PAGE 4 — THE THREE EXIT LANES, honestly labeled: Exit 1, the $18/mo GLM Coding Plan with our real 5-task day-one battery receipts (5/5, run on this exact plan) and the three catches spelled out; Exit 2, MiniMax M3 at $0.23/$0.96 per million — price-verified, with the one-boring-job test rule before you trust it; Exit 3, the Qwen open weights (2.4T custom license + the 27B straight Apache-2.0) for people who own the GPU. Plus the contrast worth knowing: Anthropic canceled its own scheduled Sonnet 5 increase the same week. PAGE 5 — THE ONE-MINUTE BILL CHECK: pull three totals from your usage page, multiply against the new sheet, compare three numbers, pick your lane — with the full reference-month ledger ($10 → $40.58 on Flash at peak; $30.70 → $121.88 on Pro). Every claim verified against api-docs.deepseek.com, docs.z.ai, openrouter.ai, huggingface.co, and platform.claude.com on August 16, 2026. Independent kit from Hyperautomation Labs — not affiliated with any provider.

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