pi-ds-pricing-regime

A pi extension that shows whether DeepSeek is currently in peak or off-peak billing mode, in the bottom-left of the footer. It reads the machine's clock, so all boundary times display in the machine's local timezone — nothing is hardcoded. It also publishes the platform credit balance and a regime-correct session spend.

What it shows

State	Footer text (bottom-left)
Peak hours	DeepSeek PEAK — until 12:00 local (amber)
Off-peak	DeepSeek off-peak — next peak 09:00 local (green)
Weekend (Beijing time)	DeepSeek off-peak (weekend flat rate) — next peak Monday 09:00 local (green)

When the next boundary is not today (e.g. on a weekend morning), the label includes the boundary's local weekday so 09:00 is not mistaken for today's clock time.

Two companion statuses can sit alongside it: the platform credit balance ($12.34, the USD entry fetched from the balance API) and the regime-correct session spend ($0.0154, see Session spend).

The status refreshes every 30s, so it flips exactly at hour boundaries.

The indicator is shown only while the selected model comes from the DeepSeek provider (ctx.model.provider === "deepseek") — the regime is DeepSeek API pricing, so it is meaningless for other providers. Switching models with /model or Ctrl+P clears or restores the status immediately. The provider id is a constant (DEEPSEEK_PROVIDER) at the top of the extension.

Pairing with a configurable footer

The extension publishes plain pi statuses (ctx.ui.setStatus), so it works with the built-in footer out of the box — no companion extension required. It publishes three keys, sorted alphabetically there:

Status key	Shows
STATUS_KEY	DeepSeek PEAK — until 12:00 local (see table above)
BALANCE_KEY	$12.34 — DeepSeek platform credit balance in USD, warning-coloured under the LOW_BALANCE thresholds
SPEND_KEY	$0.0154 — regime-correct session spend, for every provider

For a configurable multi-line footer we recommend pi-footer (pi install npm:pi-footer). It renders any published status through its external-status widget, so this extension needs no changes — add widgets keyed to the status keys above on their own line, e.g. Tavily: 73% (from a usage tracker) → regime → balance, ordered exactly as configured and hidden when empty. Hide the same keys from pi-footer's automatic extension-status row (extensionStatusRow.hiddenKeys in ~/.pi/agent/extensions/pi-footer.json) to avoid showing them twice. Removing pi-footer (pi remove npm:pi-footer) restores the built-in footer with these statuses intact.

To drop pi-footer's own cost widget, whose figure is peak-priced (see Session spend), replace it with an external-status widget keyed to SPEND_KEY: keep the spend where the cost figure was and hide the key from the automatic extension-status row, as with the others.

Session spend

Pi's session cost comes from the model catalogue, and the DeepSeek catalogue entry carries peak rates only — its cost field has no time-of-day dimension. Off-peak, and under the weekend flat rate, the platform bills half of that, so Pi's figure over-reports by 2× whenever the regime is off-peak.

This extension recomputes the spend from the session's assistant messages: a deepseek message's recorded cost is halved when its timestamp falls outside a peak window, and left as recorded otherwise. Other providers, peak windows, and messages with no readable timestamp count as recorded. The figure refreshes on each assistant message, on turn end, and on the 30s tick, and is shown for every provider (only the regime and balance statuses are DeepSeek-only).

Four decimals are shown under a dollar so the off-peak/peak difference is visible ($0.0154), two above ($12.35).

Credit balance

The /user/balance endpoint returns one entry per currency the account holds (CNY and/or USD) in an order it does not guarantee. The extension always shows the USD entry, wherever it sits in balance_infos — the published pricing and the session spend are USD, so the balance is too. An account with no USD entry reports its own currency, rendered with the matching symbol (¥12.34) rather than passed off as dollars.

The balance is fetched with the provider's resolved API key, cached, and refreshed at most once per BALANCE_REFRESH_MS; failures keep the previous value. LOW_BALANCE gives the warning colour a per-currency threshold (CNY: 20, USD: 5), with FALLBACK_LOW_BALANCE for currencies not listed.

The regime

Source: DeepSeek API pricing

• Peak hours (UTC): 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00, Monday through Friday; all other hours are off-peak at half the peak rates. In Beijing time (UTC+8), peak is 09:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00, so weekday off-peak runs 12:00–14:00 and 18:00–09:00.
• Live since: 2026-08-16T16:00:00Z (before that, billing was flat).
• Weekends: since 2026-08-22T16:00:00Z (= 2026-08-23 00:00 Beijing), Saturdays and Sundays in Beijing calendar time have no peak tiers — every call bills at the uniform off-peak rate. With the weekday windows above, the off-peak block runs from Friday 18:00 Beijing to Monday 09:00 Beijing.

All are constants at the top of extensions/deepseek-peak-offpeak.ts (PEAK_WINDOWS, WEEKEND_OFFPEAK_UTC, DEEPSEEK_PROVIDER) — edit them if DeepSeek changes the regime.

Pricing

The Flash series was repriced effective 2026-09-10T04:00:00Z (12:00 Beijing on 2026-09-10). Per 1M tokens:

	Input (cache hit)	Input (cache miss)	Output
Off-peak	$0.003	$0.15	$0.60
Peak (double)	$0.006	$0.30	$1.20

deepseek-v4-flash (internally V4.1-Flash) is the only served model: V4 Pro and the experimental vision model are deprecated. The peak/off-peak windows and the weekend flat-rate rule are unchanged by the repricing.

The pricing table is what Session spend assumes: the model catalogue carries the peak column, so off-peak messages count at half the recorded cost.

Install

Install as a pi package from npm:

pi install npm:@khaosoigai/pi-ds-pricing-regime

The package is structured as a pi package: package.json declares a pi manifest loading ./extensions, and the package is listed with the pi-package keyword for the package gallery.

From git (alternative)

The source repo can also be installed directly from git:

pi install git:github.com/khaosoi/pi-ds-pricing-regime

Pi clones it to ~/.pi/agent/git/github.com/khaosoi/pi-ds-pricing-regime/ and runs npm install there; restart pi (or /reload) to load it. The settings entry has no pinned ref, so pi update --extensions pulls latest main. Pin a ref with pi install git:github.com/khaosoi/pi-ds-pricing-regime@<ref>.

Alternative: copy extensions/deepseek-peak-offpeak.ts into .pi/extensions/ of a project for a project-local install.

Development

just format       # format TypeScript, JavaScript, JSON, and config files
just format-check # verify formatting without changing files
just lint         # run Biome lint rules
just check        # format-check + lint
just build        # check + typecheck + tests — the release gate
just typecheck    # tsc against pi's types (resolved via the peer dep in node_modules)
just test         # node:test — unit, smoke, and timezone matrix tests
just coverage     # run tests with Node's built-in coverage report (100% currently)
just pack         # npm pack --dry-run: inspect the future tarball

Biome formats and lints TypeScript, JavaScript, JSON, and configuration files. The Markdown documentation and justfile are intentionally outside these recipes. Or use the equivalent npm scripts directly (npm run format, npm run format:check, npm run lint, npm run check, npm test, and npm run coverage).

No test framework is needed: Node ≥ 23 runs the TypeScript sources directly (type stripping), and tests use the built-in node:test runner. Tests never modify the operating system clock; clock-dependent tests use only Node's process-local virtual timers.

• test/regime.test.ts — window boundaries, next-boundary math, weekend flat-rate rule.
• test/balance.test.ts — balance response parsing and rendering.
• test/spend.test.ts — regime-correct session spend: halving, weekend, other providers, malformed entries, formatting.
• test/smoke.test.ts — loads the real extension with a mock pi context and mocked timers: peak / off-peak / weekend status text, balance and spend statuses, and timer lifecycle.
• test/timezone-matrix.test.ts — runs scripts/timezone-matrix.mjs under fixed-offset zones (UTC+8, UTC+10, UTC-5) and real DST zones (America/New_York, Australia/Sydney), asserting exact local-time labels including the midnight wrap to the next day's peak and regime boundaries that land on DST transition instants.

CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) runs formatting/lint checks, typecheck, and 63 tests on Node 24 for every push/PR.

Publishing

The package is published to npm as @khaosoigai/pi-ds-pricing-regime. The metadata is already in place:

• scoped name @khaosoigai/pi-ds-pricing-regime (name reserved to your npm account)
• MIT license (LICENSE + license field)
• repository/bugs/homepage point at github.com/khaosoi/pi-ds-pricing-regime — adjust if the repo gets a different name
• publishConfig.access: "public" so the scoped package publishes publicly
• prepublishOnly gate: runs typecheck + tests before every publish

To release a new version:

1. npm run preview:package — confirm the tarball contains only extensions/, LICENSE, README.md
2. Bump version in package.json
3. Merge to main and tag the release
4. npm login (account khaosoigai) and npm publish — the prepublishOnly gate re-runs check, typecheck, and tests as the final safety net

Notes

• Labels show the next regime boundary in local time, not the full schedule, to keep the footer compact (e.g. until 12:00 local rather than 09:00–12:00, 14:00–18:00).
• Boundary labels are rendered from the boundary's actual instant (nextBoundaryUtc → formatLocalTime), so they stay correct even when a DST transition falls between now and the boundary (covered by the DST scenarios in the timezone matrix).
• A boundary on a later local date is prefixed with its local weekday name (formatLocalDayPrefix), so Saturday morning reads next peak Monday 09:00 local rather than a bare 09:00 that looks like today.