Ask HN: Which cheap Chinese LLM are you using? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which cheap Chinese LLM are you using?

18 pointslinzhangrun9 comments

In the last one or two months, starting from DeepSeek V4 Pro, there are quite many low-price Chinese models coming out. Their performance looks more or less similar to me: Mimo V2.5 Pro, MiniMax M3, and the just released GLM 5.2, etc.

Which model are you using now? Why? What are the good and bad parts?

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I was going back and forth between kimi k2.6 and deepseek v4 pro, but it's been 2 weeks that I've been using deepseek alone. It's very good and very cheap, I pay the opencode go $10 subscription and don't have to worry about quotas.

The main reason I'm using Chinese LLM is cost. Minimax M3 is a good deal with large context window. But, M3 jumps into implementation too quickly even when a task is clearly defined. It misses tests or edge cases, and occasionally lose track during longer work.

i just use review skills on my sessions/prs extensively until they're in a good place. then coverage skills (which add test coverage).

i built in skills to work with M3 in a service called typed, an ai cli. it uses m3 under the hood (up to ~500k tokens), then switches to deepseek for up to 1M. a few bells and whistles added of typescript/python coding optimization. and just built a custom TUI frontend for it (initially works with the claude code tui and still does).

to toggle the typed tui you can run:

typed cli on

typed cli off

deepseek v4 pro - but honestly it is comparable to gpt-5.4-mini, far from GPT5.4 let alone GPT5.5! Its advantage is really just its pricing. I'm going to give Kimi K2.7 a try - with K2.6, even its cloud chat locks up all the time, so it really didn't give me much confidence at all for agentic coding.

I think it is more like a post-training issue. DeepSeek is cheap enough for heavy token use, so it fits Hermes very well.

I did a bit of digging after this to see if my feeling was accurate, and lo-and-behold: https://deepswe.net/

Look at the gap between gpt5.4-mini vs deepseek v4 pro!

DeepSeek v4 let's me do more with my quota

cheap, fast, not as good, but more gets done without giving Big Ai any more money

kimi k2.7 code looks great on this ranking https://x.com/prz_chojecki/status/2065741640635990128?s=20

I use qwen3.6:36B locally

qwen3.6 35b.

other peoples compute resources are unreliable ar best.

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