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DeepSeek V4 pricing is insane, 10x-30x cheaper to use than most other models, and it usually is good enough for most tasks.
by XCSme 3mo ago
DeepSeek V4 pricing is insane, 10x-30x cheaper to use than most other models, and it usually is good enough for most tasks.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3mo agoWho do you buy DeepSeek from? I bought it through OpenRouter and used it with Pi agent. The model was good, but there appeared to be a pricing glitch or something, because it burned through $50 in under an hour on pretty trivial stuff. Pi agent claimed it only used like $1. OpenRouter claimed differently and said I used all $50.
- XCSme 3mo agoI use it through OpenRouter via Kilo Code VS Code extension. You can check the logs in OpenRouter and see which providers it used and how many tokens you used.
- matusnovak 3mo agoYou can directly from https://platform.deepseek.com/ https://platform.deepseek.com/
- try-working 3mo agosounds like a caching issue, and maybe other issues too
- kmarc 3mo agoI can highly recommend OpenCode Go. I use it from pi.dev as well through the OpenCode Go $10 subscription ($5 first month). Used more than 20M tokens at a cost of ~$20 (up to $60 is included in the $5 plan) Out of which deepseek pro had ~200 messages which is around 1.5M tokens (10+M cached)
- versteegen 3mo agoBTW the quotas for Go have very recently changed, now only $15 for some models instead of $60. Which is not actually a difference for DS4 Pro, because they lowered the token pricing 4x at the same time (to match the change in official pricing from DeepSeek months ago)
- h2aichat 3mo agoIt is great when the task is medium, but with complex tasks Opus 4.8 is better
- paweladamczuk 3mo agoCheck cache hits in your logs. You can use Openrouter or pi config to pin providers with best cache hit rates (or disable ones with the worst). I use Openrouter for everything except Deepseek. For Deepseek I use their API directly.
- throwa356262 3mo agoThere is a 3rd party harness specifically tuned for deepseek (reasonix). Have you tried that?
- Bnjoroge 3mo agowhat exactly do they do to "tune" it? It's not Deepseek's official harness, and going direct with deepseek using ur own harness is stupid cheap
- lofaszvanitt 3mo agoWhy do you even need openrouter as a middle man?
- WhereIsTheTruth 3mo agoIt doesn't matter if it's cheaper, specially if it consumes more resources to do the same task as the competition Besides, in a few days, they'll change their pricing, doubling it during their peak hours, so, realistically: - It will be 2x more expensive if you live in their time zone - It will be 1.5x more expensive if you live in a time zone that is adjacent to theirs - It will be the same price IF you use it while they sleep (during offpeak hours) It's still cheap, but the price/performance ratio is not that good DeepSeek V4 didn't produce the same impact as V3, and Huawei dropping the ball is making it worse They had promised massive price cuts for July, so now (Huawei chips), but they had to rush the cuts because lack of momumtum (they advertised them as promotion), and are now backtracking by introducing this peak hours pricing Trump decided to help them a little by allowing them to buy more NVIDIA chips, so what exactly is China's role in all of this? We are supposed to blindly pat them in the back while praising them, all while handing them over our data? I thought they were dangerous competition threatening our model of society
- XCSme 3mo agoI was not referring to the input/output price, but the cost of doing a specific tasks, in practice it is ~10x cheaper than GLM-5.2 for example, to accomplish the same task (for the tasks it can do). I have been happily using DeepSeek V4 Flash for the last couple of months now. I tried GLM-5.2 for a while, but it was too slow and verbose compare to DeepSeek V4 Flash. If I have a basic skill I need to execute, DeepSeek V4 flash is still the best model for it.
- rikima_ 3mo agoWhile willingly handing your data to american labs. Surely sounds so based.
- bwfan123 3mo ago> it usually is good enough for most tasks The model is fantastic. And costs almost nothing. The only problem I see is that they will train on your data. There are zero-data-retention providers of DeepSeek models, of which I have used openrouter (with zdr guardrails), and fireworks. But these are 3x to 5x more expensive than directly using DeepSeek, possibly due to poor caching. Thats the price to pay for zdr.
- ycui7 3mo agoevery cloud provider trains on your data, regardless of what they promise. real user interaction is the best reinforcement-learning trace.
- disgruntledphd2 3mo ago> every cloud provider trains on your data, regardless of what they promise. This is unlikely, and if true, would probably bankrupt whichever model provider got caught doing this.
- gazebo2 3mo agoThese models were trained on massive scale copyright infringement, I really don't think they're drawing the line at training on the requests you send them
- disgruntledphd2 3mo agoI hear you, but the harms were pretty diffuse for that copyright infringement, whereas large enterprises can and will sue if ZDR is not respected.
- Bnjoroge 3mo agoI use these guys. https://crof.ai/tos https://crof.ai/tos. Their prices match deepseek, pretty dang fast, and support ZDR. Maybe they serve quantized models but I havent seen a drop in quality from my evals using them vs Deepseek or even for other models.