🐳 DeepSeek Whale — DeepSeek Off-Peak Pricing Indicator for Hermes Agent Desktop
A live DeepSeek API pricing indicator for the Hermes Agent desktop app. A whale in the titlebar tells you at a glance whether DeepSeek is in peak hours (full price) or off-peak hours (half-price discount), so you never burn full-price tokens by accident.
- 🔵 Off-peak = half price — full-color blue whale with
x0.5 - ⚪ Peak = full price — greyed-out whale with
PEAK
Click the whale (or hover) for a live countdown to the next pricing switch. Repaints every 30 seconds. No backend, no API key — pure clock math against DeepSeek's fixed UTC peak windows (01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, Monday–Friday excluding Chinese public holidays; weekends and holidays always off-peak).
Also answers to Ctrl+K → DeepSeek Whale: peak status.
Why this exists
DeepSeek charges full price during peak hours and ~50% off during off-peak hours. That pricing question — "am I in peak right now?" — deserves an answer without opening a browser tab. This plugin puts it in the Hermes desktop titlebar, next to the settings gear.
Peak hours per DeepSeek's pricing page: 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, Monday through Friday, excluding Chinese public holidays. All other hours are off-peak, including full weekends and Chinese public holidays in full.
Note: the plugin is pure clock math with no holiday calendar, so on a Chinese public holiday that falls on a weekday it will still show peak — when in doubt, check the pricing page.
How it works
- Reads your system clock, converts to UTC, and checks it against the two weekday peak windows.
- Weekends always read off-peak. The countdown sweeps forward to the next rate switch, so Friday evening correctly counts down to Monday 01:00 UTC.
- Zero network calls, zero config, zero API keys. It never touches your requests — it only makes the cheap hours visible.
Install (Hermes desktop plugin)
Copy desktop/plugin.js into your Hermes home:
$HERMES_HOME/desktop-plugins/deepseek-whale/plugin.js
(folder name must equal the plugin id, which is deepseek-whale). Then in the desktop app: Ctrl+K → Reload desktop plugins. Toggle it in Settings → Plugins.
Requires the Hermes desktop app (hermes desktop). Built on the @hermes/plugin-sdk titlebar contribution area — single ESM file, no build step.
FAQ
When are DeepSeek off-peak hours? Every hour outside 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, Monday–Friday — plus full weekends and Chinese public holidays. Off-peak tokens cost half the peak rate.
Does the whale work on weekends? Yes — and it stays blue all weekend, since weekends are always off-peak.
Does it send any data anywhere? No. It reads your clock and does arithmetic locally. Nothing leaves your machine.
Retune the windows
If DeepSeek changes its peak schedule, edit PEAK_WINDOWS at the top of desktop/plugin.js:
// [startHour, endHour) in UTC
const PEAK_WINDOWS = [[1, 4], [6, 10]]
Keywords
deepseek, deepseek-api, peak-hours, off-peak, api-pricing, cost-optimization, hermes-agent, desktop-plugin, titlebar-widget, llm-pricing
License
MIT — see LICENSE.