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I've switched to non-SOTA models, which deliver comparable value at a fraction of the cost. A full day of coding with Deepseek is approx $1 in tokens, and at least for my use cases the quality is equivalent to Claude.

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If you don't mind sharing... what's your preferred vendor for Deepseek

Not who you asked, but if you're looking for a rec, I've been using GLM and Deepseek models through Deepinfra because the prices are decent for US-based deployments and there's acceptable throughput and policy/terms. I'd love to find another that lowers prices over time when they roll out e.g. multi-token prediction instead of just taking a larger margin, but I don't know of any today.

Hm. I must be holding it wrong. I hit $20 easily in 5 hours with deepseek in opencode.

Same here - curious which deepseek model and what op was doing.

I suspect it might be a question of conversational loop vs agentic dev - the former uses much less tokens than letting an autonomous agent churn away on your codebase.

My apologies, deepseek v4 flash through pi is indeed super cheap, I can see only using $1 in a day and getting a decent amount done.

Do a through audit of every single token you're sending and receiving. Some harnesses include things you didn't expect.

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