DeepShift — DeepSeek Peak/Off-Peak Timer
Know when your AI costs less. Live countdown to DeepSeek pricing windows inside VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf and any VS Code fork.
Peak is 09:00–12:00 & 14:00–18:00 Beijing (01:00–04:00 & 06:00–10:00 UTC), Monday–Friday; everything else — including weekends and Chinese public holidays — is off-peak at 50% off. DeepShift converts that to your local timezone.
What you see
- Status bar (bottom-right):
🟢 DS OFF · 2h 07m 42s ticks every second, or 🔴 DS PEAK · 2h 07m 42s. Weekend shows 🟢 DS OFF · weekend · 2h 07m 42s; a Chinese public holiday shows 🟢 DS OFF · China holiday · …. No background fill — emoji dot + PEAK/OFF text keeps it readable on light/dark themes.
- Hover tooltip: state,
Window ends in 2h 07m, a per-model price table (input cache-hit / input cache-miss / output, peak vs off-peak) for deepseek-flash and deepseek-v4-pro, 🇵🇰 Local vs 🇨🇳 Beijing times with country flags, and the date the data was verified against the official page. Minute-stable so hover doesn't jitter while the bar ticks.
- Click → panel: Current state,
Next / Then, Best off-peak window (today→tomorrow), Today's schedule in your TZ (Asia/Karachi → 06–09 Peak), Should I run now?, and per-model pricing with concurrency limits. Copy current status / Copy today's schedule included.
- Chinese public holidays are treated as off-peak all day, and the next-peak countdown skips the whole holiday block. The panel warns when the bundled holiday calendar no longer covers the current year.
- Alerts:
deepshift.notifyBeforePeakStarts and deepshift.notifyBeforeOffPeakStarts (default 10 min each), once per transition. Diagnostics via DeepShift: Diagnose Timezone.
Works via standard StatusBarItem/ThemeColor/MarkdownString/QuickPick APIs — no webviews, no runtime deps.
Screenshots
Status bar
Planning panel
Schedule & pricing
Read from the official DeepSeek rate card on 2026-10-02. USD per 1M tokens:
| Model |
Version |
input (cache hit) |
input (cache miss) |
output |
concurrency |
deepseek-flash |
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash |
$0.006 / $0.003 |
$0.30 / $0.15 |
$1.20 / $0.60 |
2500 |
deepseek-v4-pro |
DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 |
$0.044 / $0.022 |
$1.32 / $0.66 |
$3.96 / $1.98 |
500 |
Each cell is peak / off-peak. Note deepseek-v4-flash was retired on 2026-09-10 and now silently routes to V4.1 Flash — use deepseek-flash.
Prices move. The panel, tooltip and DeepShift: Diagnose Timezone all show the verification date and link to the official page; trust the page over this extension if they disagree.
Install
Marketplace: AsimAliPeerzada.deepshift — or sideload the .vsix:
code --install-extension deepshift-0.3.0.vsix
windsurf --install-extension deepshift-0.3.0.vsix
Cursor/Windsurf users: also on Open VSX (npx ovsx publish).
Develop
npm install
npm test # tsc + schedule.test.ts (weekday, weekend, holiday, timezone-boundary, price card)
npm run watch # tsc -watch
# F5 to launch Extension Development Host
npx vsce package
Configuration
| Setting |
Default |
Notes |
deepshift.notifyBeforePeakStarts |
10 |
minutes before peak, 0 disables |
deepshift.notifyBeforeOffPeakStarts |
10 |
minutes before off-peak |
Publish
Publisher is AsimAliPeerzada (package.json:publisher), repository is asim-ali-peerzada/deepshift (matches git remote). Ensure icon.png (128×128) is present at repo root, then npx vsce package and upload the .vsix at https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/manage/publishers/AsimAliPeerzada → New Extension. License: MIT.
