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Comment by NorwegianDude | Hacker News Reader

Eh, what are you guys even talking about? Deepseek is not cheapest provider as is, and it's MIT. So deepseek making it more expensive to use is just nonsense, they can only change their own pricing. It's the beauty of MIT license and open weights. If anything, these models are some of the safest in the world to use if you worry about a rug pull.

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There's more to inference than just the input/output token cost. Caching has a massive impact.

Deepseek charges $0.0028 per cache read on Openrouter. The next cheapest is $0.018.

That's a massive difference and quickly adds up on coding sessions (which often hit 95%+ cached tokens).

90%+ cache hit rate is common, and so you'll see on places like openrouter that Deepseek cache cost is indeed a magnitude cheaper than the rest.

My usage thus far from api.deepseek.com

  - input_cache_hit_tokens: 1,265,646,976 x 0.0000000028 = $3.5438115328
  - input_cache_miss_tokens: 18,208,088 x 0.00000014 = $2.54913232
  - output_tokens: 9,615,178 x 0.00000028 = $2.69224984
  - request_count: 10,837 (no price)

Total cost: $8.7851936928 (approximately $8.79)

Cache:

  - Hit: 1,265,646,976
  - Miss: 18,208,088
  - Total input tokens: 1,283,855,064

Hit rate: 98.582% (1,265,646,976 / 1,283,855,064)

So your cost would be $40.68 with another provider that has one less zero in the cache hit price.

Cached input tokens are what drives most costs.

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