DeepSeek Peak Indicator

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A lightweight DeepSeek Harness plugin that shows the current DeepSeek API pricing period — Peak or Off-Peak — directly in the sidebar footer, from application start, with no Session open. Click it to see the countdown to the next pricing transition.

It needs no API key, makes no network requests and does not poll anything: the schedule is computed locally from the clock and a bundled, verified Chinese holiday calendar.

Peak means the official API pricing period, not server congestion or server health. The indicator reports the billing period defined by DeepSeek; it says nothing about API load, latency or availability. Peak prices are the higher peak rate; Off-Peak is the half-price rate.

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Install

Requires DeepSeek Harness Desktop v0.2.1-rc.5 — the version this release is built and tested against. No extra runtime, build step or npm dependency is needed.

The package is @jalilahmad.fazeli/deepseek-peak-indicator. Install it from npm or directly from GitHub:

From npm

dsh plugin --profile web add @jalilahmad.fazeli/deepseek-peak-indicator

From GitHub

dsh plugin --profile web add github:jalilahmad/deepseek-peak-indicator

Reload the Harness Web GUI (or restart DeepSeek Harness Desktop) after installing. On a harness with HMR a page refresh is usually enough.

Install from the Plugin Manager instead

1. Open Plugins in the Harness sidebar.
2. Choose Add plugin → Install a third-party plugin.
3. Enter the npm package name @jalilahmad.fazeli/deepseek-peak-indicator, or the GitHub spec github:jalilahmad/deepseek-peak-indicator.
4. Make sure the bundle is switched On, then reload the page.

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Features

• One glance, three states — 🟢 OFF-PEAK, 🔴 PEAK, ⚪ UNKNOWN.
• Next-transition countdown — the popover shows the remaining time in whole hours and minutes.
• Accurate boundaries — the status flips exactly at the official period boundary; the countdown refreshes once a minute and an exact timer handles the transition itself.
• Always present — a root-scoped sidebar-footer entry that exists before any Session, Conversation or Composer is opened.
• Holiday-aware — verified Chinese public-holiday dates for 2025 and 2026; an unverified year is reported honestly as UNKNOWN, never guessed.
• Timezone-safe — the schedule is evaluated in UTC, holiday dates in China Standard Time, and all conversions use the browser's IANA Intl database (no hardcoded offsets, DST-safe).
• Tiny and private — one client bundle, one Host row, one 60-second timer plus one transition timer; no API key, backend, database, telemetry or network polling.
• Clean lifecycle — timers, listeners, observers and styles are all disposed on unload; reloading creates exactly one indicator.

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Screenshots

Real captures from DeepSeek Harness Desktop v0.2.1-rc.5 running this plugin. Workspace names and session titles are blurred for privacy.

Full application — indicator in the sidebar footer

OFF-PEAK with the minimal popover

Plugin entry in the Plugin Manager

The PEAK and UNKNOWN captures are still pending because those states require real schedule conditions that did not exist at capture time: PEAK occurs only in the official weekday peak windows, and UNKNOWN only when the current year's Chinese holiday calendar is not verified. They will be added after the next real PEAK window; see docs/screenshots/SCREENSHOTS_NEEDED.md for the exact conditions and capture steps.

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How it works

The indicator registers in sidebar.footer.action, the root-scoped list slot beside Settings, declared by the shipped @deepseek-ai/dsh-client-ui-sidebar package. It is part of the permanent application shell, so it does not depend on a Session, Conversation or Composer. The expanded sidebar shows a small pill (dot + label); the 56 px rail shows the dot-only compact form.

States

State	Meaning
🔴 PEAK	Inside an official peak window, Monday–Friday, and the date is not a verified Chinese public holiday. Higher API price applies.
🟢 OFF-PEAK	Everything else: outside the two daily peak windows, on a weekend, or on a verified Chinese public holiday. Half-price API price applies.
⚪ UNKNOWN	Inside a weekday peak window, but the local holiday calendar for that year is not verified (missing, unpublished or malformed). The plugin refuses to guess.

Weekends are off-peak for the whole day, including weekend makeup workdays (调休), following DeepSeek's wording that weekends and holidays are off-peak “in full”.

The minimal popover

Click the indicator; click it again, press Escape, or click outside to close it. The popover has exactly two lines:

🔴 PEAK
Off-Peak starts in: 2h 13m

🟢 OFF-PEAK
Peak starts in: 61h 29m

⚪ UNKNOWN
Next transition cannot be reliably determined.

The countdown is whole hours and minutes only (never seconds). It refreshes once a minute, while an exact transition timer flips the status at the official boundary. If the end of the current period would fall into an unverified holiday year, the plugin shows the UNKNOWN line instead of inventing a countdown.

Timezone handling

• Peak windows are compared against UTC minutes-of-day.
• Chinese holiday dates are looked up against the Asia/Shanghai calendar date of the instant.
• The China-midnight boundary is derived from that zone with Intl (16:00 UTC for Asia/Shanghai) — computed, never hardcoded.
• The bundle keeps DST-safe, IANA-based helpers with Asia/Kabul as the default display zone (DISPLAY_TIME_ZONE in client.js); the current minimal popover intentionally shows only durations, so timezone handling does not affect what is displayed, only correctness.

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Pricing schedule

Per the official DeepSeek pricing documentation:

Period	When (UTC)	Price
Peak	Monday–Friday, 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 — excluding Chinese public holidays	Full peak price
Off-Peak	All other hours, weekends, and Chinese public holidays in full	Half of peak

Beijing-time equivalents: 09:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00. Peak/off-peak pricing was introduced at 16:00 UTC on 2026-08-16 according to the official change log; always confirm current numbers on the official pricing page.

Official sources: DeepSeek pricing · Chinese pricing page · Change log.

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Chinese public holidays

Holiday dates live in the editable holidays.json and are inlined into the browser bundle by tools/sync-holidays.mjs (a browser bundle cannot read a sibling file at runtime).

• 2025 and 2026 are verified from the State Council notices (2025, 2026).
• A year counts as verified only with verified: true, a non-empty official source, and well-formed, real calendar dates.
• 2027 is deliberately unverified — the annual arrangement had not been published when this release was prepared. 2027 weekday peak windows therefore show UNKNOWN; weekends and off-peak hours remain certain.
• A year without verified data can never produce a false PEAK.

To add a year: edit holidays.json, run node tools/sync-holidays.mjs, then run the tests.

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Privacy and architecture

• No API key. The plugin never asks for, stores or uses one.
• No backend, no database, no storage. There is no server component and no account access.
• No network requests, no polling, no telemetry. client.js contains no fetch, XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket, EventSource or dynamic import(); it reads the local clock and the bundled holiday table only.
• No secrets in the repository. No keys, tokens, personal paths or machine-specific state.
• Standard plugin caveat. Like every DSH plugin, plugin code runs with the Harness application's local permissions. Review the source before installing; details and reporting are in SECURITY.md.

The plugin is a DSH bundle with an empty Host half and a browser-side Client half:

1. package.json declares dsh.bundle (the Cordis patch that inserts the Loader row) and dsh.client (the browser entry).
2. cordis.patch.yml inserts the plugin row; index.js is a deliberately empty apply().
3. client.js registers a lazy module factory, adds the locale dictionaries, and registers the indicator in sidebar.footer.action through ctx.slots.
4. One wall-clock state, one 60-second interval and one exact transition timer drive the UI; all of them are cleaned up when the slot entry unloads.

The complete design, status algorithm, transition search and cleanup rules are in docs/architecture.md.

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Compatibility and limitations

• Tested only on DeepSeek Harness Desktop v0.2.1-rc.5 (Windows). Other DSH versions, clients and platforms are not claimed compatible; engines.dsh pins the tested version so untested runtimes are refused instead of loaded blindly.
• Windows collapsed sidebar. On the Windows titlebar layout the shipped sidebar shell hides its entire footer when the sidebar is collapsed (including the shipped Settings control), so the indicator is visible in the default expanded sidebar but not in that collapsed state. The dot-only compact form is used in the 56 px rail where the shell renders the footer.
• 2027 holiday data. 2027 weekday peak windows show UNKNOWN until the official notice is published and the calendar is updated. Weekends and off-hours remain certain.
• Package identity. The public package is @jalilahmad.fazeli/deepseek-peak-indicator; this is also the Harness module/package identity used by both npm and GitHub installs. Installations made before this rename (under @local/deepseek-peak-indicator) should be removed first and then reinstalled. The plugin row id deepseek-peak-indicator and all runtime behavior are unchanged.
• Screenshots. Three real captures are shipped; PEAK and UNKNOWN captures require genuine schedule conditions and remain pending. See Screenshots and SCREENSHOTS_NEEDED.md.

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Update and uninstall

Update — DeepSeek Harness does not update arbitrary installed bundles in place:

1. Open Plugins, find DeepSeek Peak Indicator, and choose Remove (or dsh plugin --profile web remove @jalilahmad.fazeli/deepseek-peak-indicator).
2. Reinstall from the same command in Install.
3. Reload the Web GUI.

If you installed the earlier pre-npm bundle, remove the old package first: dsh plugin --profile web remove @local/deepseek-peak-indicator.

Uninstall — Plugins → DeepSeek Peak Indicator → Remove, or:

dsh plugin --profile web remove @jalilahmad.fazeli/deepseek-peak-indicator

The plugin stores nothing outside its own bundle, so uninstalling leaves no data behind.

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Development

No build step and no dependencies. The only Node.js scripts are the test suite and the holiday sync tool.

deepseek-peak-indicator/
├── client.js                 # browser half: schedule core, sidebar indicator, popover, timers
├── index.js                  # empty Host half (Loader row)
├── package.json              # bundle manifest, dsh.bundle / dsh.client, metadata
├── cordis.patch.yml          # Loader patch inserting the plugin row
├── holidays.json             # editable Chinese public holiday calendar
├── icon.svg                  # previous plugin icon (retained as backup)
├── locale/                   # plugin display metadata (en, zh)
├── tools/sync-holidays.mjs   # inlines holidays.json into client.js
├── test/schedule.test.mjs    # 22 Node tests (schedule, popover, registration)
├── docs/                     # architecture, marketplace notes, screenshot instructions
├── assets/                   # README banner, runtime plugin icon, marketplace icons
├── screenshots.json          # marketplace storefront screenshot list
├── README.md · README.fa.md · README.zh-CN.md
├── CHANGELOG.md · CONTRIBUTING.md · SECURITY.md · LICENSE
└── .gitignore · .gitattributes

assets/readme-banner.png is the README hero banner. assets/icon-512.png (512×512 PNG, 58.6 KiB, within DSH's 256 KiB plugin-icon limit) is the runtime plugin icon, exported through the existing ./icon manifest export; it was verified live in the Plugin Manager. icon.svg is retained as the previous icon/backup, and assets/icon-180.png remains a smaller marketplace fallback.

Run the tests:

node --test test/schedule.test.mjs

Expected result: 22 tests, 22 pass, 0 fail (verified with Node.js v24.21.0, the runtime bundled with DSH Desktop v0.2.1-rc.5). The suite covers both peak windows, off-peak hours, weekends and makeup workdays, holiday overrides, the unpublished-2027 UNKNOWN state, exact transition instants, countdown formatting, the two-line popover model, the wide/compact forms, the single slot registration, the Intl-derived China-midnight boundary and malformed-date rejection.

Local development install:

git clone https://github.com/jalilahmad/deepseek-peak-indicator.git
dsh plugin --profile web add <absolute-path-to-checkout>

Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md and SECURITY.md. Architecture notes: docs/architecture.md; marketplace/submission notes: docs/marketplaces.md.

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License, author and credits

MIT © 2026 Jalil Ahmad Fazeli · @jalilahmad · repository · issues

This is an independent community plugin, not affiliated with DeepSeek.

Credits and official sources:

• The plugin follows the official DeepSeek Harness bundle/Cordis plugin model (dsh.bundle patch + dsh.client browser half + ctx.slots registration).
• Pricing rules: DeepSeek API pricing and Chinese version; introduction date: change log.
• Chinese public holiday arrangements: 2025 and 2026 State Council notices (linked above).
• Intl/IANA timezone data comes from the browser runtime; react and react-dom are provided by the Harness browser module table. No third-party source code is vendored.
• Icon and README banner artwork are original assets created for this plugin.