5 ms·

No, Claude subscription tokens are not cheaper than the Deepseek API. You are dead wrong on that.

SwellJoe 4mo ago
I just built a pretty complicated OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities) data pipeline, 731 lines of code (excluding comments), DuckDB, etc. for $0.31 in Reasonix. According to Reasonix, I'm averaging 97.90% cached tokens (which are like an order of magnitude cheaper than non-cached). If I worked eight hours every day, at that rate, I'd be spending about $2 to $3 a day. So...yeah, DeepSeek is cheaper, but not, like crazily cheaper than the $100 plan from Anthropic, where I rarely run out of tokens. But, Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing people toward usage-based billing rather than flat rate subscriptions. The free lunch from the big guys is coming to an end, I suspect, at which point, spending $50-$75 a month with DeepSeek begins to seem like a good option. There are also a bunch of things where the API is the only reasonable way to make use of a model, and DeepSeek makes that easy and cheap, none of the US vendors do. It's extremely expensive to use Anthropic and OpenAI APIs. I'm always trying to find places I can replace Opus API usage with DeepSeek or MiMo or even GLM (though, so far, GLM is also a bit pricey, I guess their coding plans provide API access and make it cheaper, so that might be an option).
Chyzwar 4mo ago
My 7-day stats from the codeburn tool: $2,123.26 cost, 11,370 calls, 333 sessions, 96.7% cache hit. Breakdown: 4.5M in, 18.1M out, 2,084.9M cached, 66.6M written. I spent $2,000 in tokens on my $200/month subscription in just one week. This also excludes heavy usage of Cowork and Claude Design. Claude estimated that the same usage on DeepSeek Pro API would cost me $200 for the week. A month averages 4 weeks, so I can estimate that Claude is 4x cheaper than DeepSeek for me. What are you basic your opinion ?
- slopinthebag 4mo ago
  Because my highest usage day with over 30,000,000 tokens was about $0.50. Even at your numbers you get like $20 usage a week MAX. Actually it’s less but I can’t be arsed to do the math. 18,000,000 input tokens x $0.87 per million, is like $16. I don’t really understand the metrics that your program is producing. But your numbers seem odd. I get much more input than output tokens, and almost all of them are cached. You having way more output tokens is either a non-agentic coding use case, or a harness issue.

I just built a pretty complicated OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities) data pipeline, 731 lines of code (excluding comments), DuckDB, etc. for $0.31 in Reasonix. According to Reasonix, I'm averaging 97.90% cached tokens (which are like an order of magnitude cheaper than non-cached). If I worked eight hours every day, at that rate, I'd be spending about $2 to $3 a day. So...yeah, DeepSeek is cheaper, but not, like crazily cheaper than the $100 plan from Anthropic, where I rarely run out of tokens. But, Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing people toward usage-based billing rather than flat rate subscriptions. The free lunch from the big guys is coming to an end, I suspect, at which point, spending $50-$75 a month with DeepSeek begins to seem like a good option. There are also a bunch of things where the API is the only reasonable way to make use of a model, and DeepSeek makes that easy and cheap, none of the US vendors do. It's extremely expensive to use Anthropic and OpenAI APIs. I'm always trying to find places I can replace Opus API usage with DeepSeek or MiMo or even GLM (though, so far, GLM is also a bit pricey, I guess their coding plans provide API access and make it cheaper, so that might be an option).

Chyzwar 4mo ago

My 7-day stats from the codeburn tool: $2,123.26 cost, 11,370 calls, 333 sessions, 96.7% cache hit. Breakdown: 4.5M in, 18.1M out, 2,084.9M cached, 66.6M written. I spent $2,000 in tokens on my $200/month subscription in just one week. This also excludes heavy usage of Cowork and Claude Design. Claude estimated that the same usage on DeepSeek Pro API would cost me $200 for the week. A month averages 4 weeks, so I can estimate that Claude is 4x cheaper than DeepSeek for me. What are you basic your opinion ?

slopinthebag 4mo ago
Because my highest usage day with over 30,000,000 tokens was about $0.50. Even at your numbers you get like $20 usage a week MAX. Actually it’s less but I can’t be arsed to do the math. 18,000,000 input tokens x $0.87 per million, is like $16. I don’t really understand the metrics that your program is producing. But your numbers seem odd. I get much more input than output tokens, and almost all of them are cached. You having way more output tokens is either a non-agentic coding use case, or a harness issue.