# Price-change notice: 14 days, 30 days, or nothing at all

> Fourteen days, thirty days, thirty days, and none at all. In one week this August, one provider cancelled an increase it had already announced and another rebuilt its whole price sheet on three days' notice — and both acted entirely within their own terms. Here are the four clauses side by side, where each one is buried, and what the floor means for how often you should re-check a price.

- Published: Aug 23, 2026
- Author: PiRouter Team, Engineering
- Tags: pricing, providers, cost
- Canonical: https://pirouter.ai/blog/price-notice-is-a-contract-clause

---
Four providers, four different answers, and none of them are on the pricing page you
bookmarked. **OpenAI: 14 days. Anthropic: 30 days, or whenever you receive notice,
whichever comes first. Google: 30 days — except for new paid services, which can start
charging immediately. DeepSeek: nothing committed, and it says so plainly, recommending
you check the page yourself.**

That spread is not a story about generosity. It is a number you can put into an operations
schedule, and this month gave us both ends of it in the same week.

## The four clauses, side by side

Every row below was read from the provider's own legal page. The wording is quoted, not
paraphrased.

| Provider | Committed notice | Where the clause lives |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | 14 days | [Services Agreement](https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement) §6.6, titled **Corrections** |
| Anthropic | 30 days **or** on receipt of notice, whichever is earlier | [Commercial Terms](https://www.anthropic.com/legal/commercial-terms) §H.1, Payment of Fees |
| Google | 30 days, unless otherwise specified | [Gemini API Additional Terms](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms), Payment Terms |
| DeepSeek | None committed | [Pricing page](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing) |

The exact language matters more than the number in at least three of these.

**OpenAI** — "Price changes on the Pricing Page will be effective fourteen days after they
are posted. OpenAI has the right to correct pricing errors or mistakes even after issuing
an invoice or receiving payment." Both sentences sit in the same clause, and that clause
is headed *Corrections*. Fourteen days is the shortest committed window of the four, and
the second sentence means an invoice you have already paid is not necessarily final.

Note what this clause is *not*. Elsewhere in the same agreement, §16.13(a) promises thirty
days before an update that materially affects your rights takes effect — but that governs
changes to *the agreement*. Price changes run on §6.6's fourteen days. Reading the thirty
across is an easy and expensive mistake.

**Anthropic** — "Anthropic may update the published rates, to be effective the earlier of
30 days after the updates are posted by Anthropic or Customer otherwise receives Notice."
*The earlier of* is doing real work here, and it cuts against the customer: if notice
reaches you on day three, the change is live on day three. Thirty days is a ceiling on the
wait, not a floor on your planning horizon.

**Google** — "Google may make changes to this pricing from time to time, effective 30 days
after they are posted unless otherwise specified (or in the case of new Paid Services,
where pricing takes effect immediately unless otherwise specified)." Two escape hatches in
one sentence. Thirty days is the default, and a default is a different object from a
commitment.

**DeepSeek** — "Product prices may vary and DeepSeek reserves the right to adjust them. We
recommend topping up based on your actual usage and regularly checking this page for the
most recent pricing information." No period, and an explicit transfer of the monitoring
duty to you. It is the most honest of the four, in the narrow sense that it describes what
it will actually do.

There is a second finding in that table that has nothing to do with the numbers: **finding
the clause is harder than reading it.** OpenAI's is under *Corrections*, not *Fees*.
Google's is in Additional Terms rather than the main terms of service. If you have ever
tried to answer "what notice are we owed?" for a procurement review, you already know that
the twenty minutes go into locating the paragraph, not interpreting it.

## Two directions in the same week

Clauses are theoretical until somebody uses one. This month, two providers moved in
opposite directions, eight days apart.

**Anthropic cancelled an increase it had already announced.** Claude Sonnet 5 launched at
$2/$10 per million input/output tokens, described as introductory pricing through August
31, with $3/$15 scheduled for September 1. The pricing page now reads:

> The $2/$10 per million input/output token pricing for Claude Sonnet 5, announced at
> launch as introductory pricing through August 31, 2026, is now the standard price. The
> previously scheduled increase to $3/$15 per million input/output tokens on September 1,
> 2026 will not occur.

An announced increase, withdrawn, with the introductory rate becoming standard. Far more
than thirty days of effective notice — in the customer's favour, since the notice was of a
change that then didn't happen.

**DeepSeek rebuilt its price sheet on three days' notice.** The official changelog entry
is dated August 13 and states that the new prices "will take effect at 16:00 (UTC Time) on
August 16, 2026." Three days from announcement to a structural change: peak/off-peak
pricing, with off-peak at half of peak, and peak hours running 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00
UTC on weekdays.

**Three days is fully compliant with DeepSeek's own terms.** That is the entire point.
There is no violation here and no bad actor — the company published no notice period, gave
three days anyway, and did exactly what its published terms permit. The floor was
available, and it got used.

What makes the pair instructive is that neither behaviour was predictable from the
provider's reputation, and both were predictable from the clause. One provider's contract
floor was low and the floor is where the price change landed. Another's was thirty days
and the change went the other way entirely.

## What the floor actually buys you

Translate the clause into the only operational question it answers: **how long can a
cached copy of this provider's price sheet be wrong before you find out?**

| Provider | Contract floor | Longest safe gap between checks | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | 14 days | Weekly | Under-billed forecasts; §6.6 also permits post-invoice correction |
| Anthropic | 30 days, or on notice | Weekly, plus a notice inbox somebody reads | Notice can arrive well before day 30 and start the clock |
| Google | 30 days by default | Bi-weekly, plus a check when adopting a new paid service | A newly adopted paid service can price immediately |
| DeepSeek | None | Daily, or automated | Sole safeguard is your own polling |

Two of those rows are not about frequency at all. Anthropic's says a notification channel
matters more than a calendar — the thirty days can be cut short by a message nobody read.
Google's says the risk concentrates at adoption time, because the immediate-effect carve-
out applies to *new* paid services rather than to price movements on existing ones.

And DeepSeek's row is the one worth sitting with. Where there is no committed period, your
review cadence *is* the notice period. There is nothing else.

A concrete illustration of what a stale sheet does. DeepSeek V4 Flash now prices every
line twice:

| deepseek-v4-flash, per 1M tokens | Off-peak | Peak |
|---|---|---|
| Cache-hit input | $0.007 | $0.014 |
| Cache-miss input | $0.22 | $0.44 |
| Output | $0.66 | $1.32 |

Peak runs 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC on weekdays — that is **02:00–05:00 and
07:00–11:00 in London**, **21:00–00:00 and 02:00–06:00 US Eastern** (previous day), and
**09:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00 in Beijing and Singapore**. Where your team sits decides
whether this change is a rounding error or a doubling: for an Asian working day it covers
essentially the whole of it.

Any cost model built before August 16 has a single number where there are now two. The
model is not slightly off — it is missing a dimension.

## Compute the delta yourself

Reported percentage increases for this change have circulated widely. We are not quoting
them, for a plain reason: **they cannot be reproduced from the current price sheet.** You
cannot tell which two prices are being compared or what the baseline was, which makes the
number unusable for a budget.

What you can do instead: take your own mix of the three lines above, multiply by the
current prices, then weight by the share of your calls that actually land in the peak
window. That is your increase, and it will not match anyone else's — under peak/off-peak
pricing, **the delta depends on when you send requests**, so two teams with identical
volume can land in very different places.

If you do not know your peak share, that is itself the finding. Bucketing a week of
request timestamps by UTC hour is a short query, and it is the input every subsequent
decision here needs.

## Review cadence belongs in a scheduler, not in a habit

If the notice period is a per-provider constant, then a single global refresh interval for
every price sheet you hold is wrong by construction — too eager for one provider, too slow
for another, and silently too slow for whichever provider commits to nothing.

This is the sort of thing that should be configuration rather than discipline. PiRouter's
pricing layer is **designed to** hold per-provider price snapshots with their own review
cadence, so a provider with no committed notice period is polled on a schedule that
reflects that, rather than inheriting whatever interval suited a provider with a thirty-day
floor. This is a design direction, not a shipped guarantee — [the routing docs](https://pirouter.ai/docs)
show what is live today.

You do not need any of that to act on the table above, though. A calendar reminder and a
diff against the provider's published page will catch the same class of surprise.

## The one-paragraph version

Four providers publish four different commitments, and they do not line up with
reputation, size, or price. The clause is rarely where you would look for it: under
*Corrections* in one case, in a secondary terms document in another. This month proved the
floor is not decorative, when one provider restructured its entire price sheet three days
after announcing it and stayed comfortably within its terms.

If these four are your whole list, copy the third column of the table above into your cost
model and you are done. If you use anyone else, go find their number once — and budget
twenty minutes for locating the paragraph rather than reading it.

---

## Sources

### openai.com

- [Services Agreement](https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement)

### anthropic.com

- [Commercial Terms](https://www.anthropic.com/legal/commercial-terms)

### ai.google.dev

- [Gemini API Additional Terms](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms)

### api-docs.deepseek.com

- [Pricing page](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing)