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Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

It was for me too but the new deepseek pricing is too good to ignore for now.

I honestly think that with my electricity prices running qwen 36B myself is more expensive than hitting the cache rate at deepseek.

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Can you elaborate on DeepSeek (deepseek-v4-flash, i assume?). What does your typical usage pattern look like and what is your weekly/monthly spend?

I gave it a try for a few days (pi + openrouter + deepseek-v4-flash via deepinfra) and ended up paying ~$18 for rather light usage. Yes it's still cheap, yes it's fast, but i feel i would still get a better deal with a Claude subscription plan.

DeepSeek without OpenRouter is wayyyy cheaper

Is it? OpenRouter shows DeepInfra being cheaper than DeepSeek directly

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-20260731#pr...

I agree with parent. OpenRouter might be cheaper list-price, but i have been using 10$ on DS platform since April/May, still have 2$ left. Using OpenRouter i depleted the same dollar-amount in a 1-2 weeks with same usage pattern. No idea why.

Not used it but from perusing forums, consensus is OpenRouter has terrible/broken caching for Deepseek wildly inflating token use. The cache metrics are visible so you can verify for yourself (apparently, it's what others have done).

What does your usage look like?

DeepInfra's Cache Read is 6.5 times more expensive than DeepSeek.

And in many scenarios, cache hits are 99% of tokens, so the price difference in caching really adds up quickly.

Interesting. My anecdotal experience is that it is.

Going directly though DeepSeek's API and hitting all day long with light/medium tasks I'm at $5/month. That's with pretty vanilla ohmypi.

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