A lot of the freakout and "bye" posts on the OpenCodeCLI subreddit due to DeepSeek raising prices.

Stripe is a middleman. So is OpenRouter. So is OpenCode. Unless you own the data center and the hardware, how cheap can a middleman's tokens really be compared to the hyperscalers, without massive model compression?

Even DeepSeek itself is raising token prices. How much margin is there for a middleman like Stripe buying tokens in bulk from a data center and reselling them? Last i check Stripe do not run or own physical data center

I doubt Stripe can do much better here.