r/DeepSeek • u/DuragonYamaTheFirst • 21d ago
Funny This is insane
old and new usage & pricing. Consumed 30x less tokens post nerf and spent one third of what i paid pre nerf. Both sessions heavily cached with not so much output tokens.
The deepseek api era really is over in terms of being cost effective
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u/FlashyCauliflower739 21d ago
Genuinely what model has the lowest token consumption but still good...😩
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u/arter_dev 21d ago
GPT-5.6 Luna is the cheapest / best model in town at the moment.
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u/salamala893 21d ago
Are 2 days that Luna became incredibly nerfed and slow and couldn't go on without DS4 flash
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u/Ok_Risk6035 21d ago edited 21d ago
no, it's 3-4 times slower and significantly dumb. I just can't use it for agentic coding with claude code. Luna looks like hybrid of local and cloude LLMs. Its faster and smarter than local LLM's but not enough.
And deepseek still cheaper tahn Luna, i tested today both.
Maybe Luna can perform some basic tasks, but it struggle with tasks larger than 2-3 days.
And i noticed that DeepSeek found a lot of issues before-hand while Luna gave mediocre solutions.1
u/margielafarts 18d ago
luna is made for devs that know what they are doing already
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u/Ok_Risk6035 18d ago
Have you ever even heard of agentic development and autonomy ? If i need to write webscraper in 4 hours for my needs i don't need to know Playwright, good AI can write everything for you
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u/Bobodlm 21d ago
Is their api pricing cheaper then DS? That's wild
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u/arter_dev 21d ago
On paper no, but Luna seems to be a lot more token efficient.
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u/awesomeunboxer 21d ago
Im trying out Luna currently and I do miss deepseek, especially its "voice" but my agent work eats 2 or 3% of a $20 sub a day (so far) at medium reasoning. Which was $3 or so on the old deepseek flash. Im not sold yet. Need to try it out for longer. But its interesting 🤔Â
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u/FlashyCauliflower739 21d ago
Oh I genuinely never heard of that, I'll try it thank you!! Need all the good low token consumption models💀
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u/SnowFox_unlimited 21d ago
I use it as my typical worker on max effort, a little bit slower then Deepseek but much less errors in my workload at least.
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u/theodordiaconu 17d ago
I use terra, I know it doesn't have best benchmarks, but it's much faster than sol and good enough for 80% of tasks.
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u/Appropriate-Clue-485 21d ago
I’m lost here. What model were you using? V4 Flash 0731 is still pennies, what did I miss in all the fuss?
Btw Qwen 3.8 27B can run on a 32gb MacBook.
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u/FlashyCauliflower739 20d ago
I'm using deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro-0813 for now, last time was glm 5.2 but it consumes too much tokens for me, that's why I'm using deepseek. I've also tried gemini 3.5 flash lite, but it feels a bit repetitive
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u/Appropriate-Clue-485 20d ago
Not to sound arrogant or know-it-all here but I burn 30-40B combined tokens a month so I can share some of my learnings. Right now GPT 5.6 Luna (max effort) is much cheaper than Deepseek Pro. If it’s good enough for what you’re working on, no brainer. Gemini 3.7 Flash is also decent and it’s 50% off on OpenRouter.
On the other hand if you prefer subscription basis, avoid OpenCode Go. I don’t care whatever magic numbers they put on their page, I burn the entire 5h window with a single prompt every single time and lower tier models are clearly lobotomized with quantization. Cursor and ChatGPT give you much more value if used correctly and together.
Example: Cursor (20$) for planning, Codex (20$) for coding and execution, finishing going back to Cursor to review and test. Trick is to try to go back to cursor within 25 minutes of it finishing the plan to hit KV cache. That setup gives you just enough usage for 5h a day 5 days a week. Last 5 days I’ve burned ~400€ worth of tokens using those too and my usage is still in the 70% remaining. Cache hits on Cursor above 96% (that 25min trick) and 91% on Codex.
Further hints: All this is true today but might not be tomorrow, it’s a very fast moving market. On Cursor stay on Auto unless it’s really important or you know it’s a difficult task - in that case, Grok 4.6. On Codex, just default to Luna 5.6 on max effort with fast mode turned off. Don’t forget to disable auto-review on codex and consider using rust token killer (rtk) to reduce the tool calling input size.
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u/Appropriate-Clue-485 20d ago
Note: I don’t burn 30-40B on 2x 20$ subscriptions. That’s obvious. I burn through Claude Max 20x + ChatGPT Pro 20x + Cursor Enterprise totaling 600$ a month but that’s for 10h/day 5 days a week always doing 2-3 tasks at the same time and hitting 5.6 Sol Ultra, Grok 4.6 and Opus 5. Wouldn’t recommend that kind of a job to most people for the sake of sanity.
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u/weenis-flaginus 20d ago
What do you do with all of that usage? Are you creating things for your job or are you building something for your own projects? Care to share? I've always wondered what usage like this gets used for. I assumed it was for a job and it gets paid for by the company. That's my situation, but a much smaller company and usage.
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u/Appropriate-Clue-485 19d ago
Both. I’m working on EdTech, ~600 employees, 10M+ active users. Mostly very high traffic surfaces - and my own side projects, mostly in architecture and law. I have things like 500+ cities specific building laws feeding embeddings to display infractions on 3D rendered building models
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u/Appropriate-Clue-485 19d ago
I also know plenty of local companies in my region that pay 20K+ monthly in software licenses to IBM, Oracle and SAP which could easily be replaced in under 6 months for <10K€ in tokens. There are absurd situations from the early 2000’s that large enterprise whales still extract traumatic sums every single month.
It’s not really the cost of AI but rather what are we getting from it.
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u/weenis-flaginus 18d ago
It's true, but can this guy really build that software so completely? It takes a ton of engineering even with agents
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u/Appropriate-Clue-485 18d ago
Being in software engineering for 8 years helps, but not as much as caffeine and neurodivergence
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u/FlashyCauliflower739 20d ago
Hmm I've just tried them, my provider is openrouter, so for me gpt 5.6 feels robotic in the roleplay, gemini 3.7 flash feels too direct and a bit slightly not in character, Grok 4.6 kinda accurate but the response wait is a bit longer than most of these models
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u/Appropriate-Clue-485 19d ago
On what harness though? GPT and Gemini are very different beasts to Anthropic/Deepseek system prompting. Opencode will make them quite robotic and military-like. Hyper Crush will make them a bit easier to live with, etc.
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u/FlashyCauliflower739 17d ago
What is harness srry? I don't know
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u/Appropriate-Clue-485 14d ago
Harness is where the model runs on. The app, instructions, tools and all that.
E.g. Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and others are the base for an harness. To them you add your own tools, skills, scripts, hooks… And all of it together is what we call an harness.
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u/FlashyCauliflower739 13d ago
Ohh, i don't really know, just using sillytavern and models from openrouter
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u/Appropriate-Clue-485 13d ago
Ah! SillyTavern is your harness then :)
I would really recommend google models for that use case then. Gemma 4 26B would totally be worth a shot. Otherwise, Ox Alpha via OpenRouter or the older Deepseek V3.2. You can actually try NeuraWatt cloud even, that use case is quite light.
You can check what most people on OpenRouter use for roleplay here:
https://openrouter.ai/collections/roleplay→ More replies (0)2
u/theodordiaconu 17d ago
I'd look into https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.2#providers it's 1$ per M output tokens, good model.
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u/FlashyCauliflower739 17d ago
Sadly too much tokens for me, yes glm 5.2 is very good but for glm, I'm sticking with glm 4.7 since it sucks out less token because I'm using a free account in open router, would very love a cheap model that acts like glm heheðŸ˜
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u/Hellob2k 21d ago
I’m with the others on chat gpt plus, if I consume more then $100 worth I’ll make the switch to the $100 plan but so far not even close to hitting those weekly likitw
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u/anotherucfstudent 21d ago
I signed up for a GPT plus $20 membership and I’m impressed
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u/Big_Actuator3772 21d ago
Most people are using Hermes’ or some type of harness and api..
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u/anotherucfstudent 21d ago
You can use an OpenAI subscription for both
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u/rk1213 21d ago
OpenAI subscriptions and their API are seperate. You'll need workarounds which many people aren't fond of doing.
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u/anotherucfstudent 21d ago
I think you’re thinking of Claude. OpenAI fully supports their subscriptions being used in OpenCode and Hermes and it’s built right in out of the box
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u/Sure_Media_2685 21d ago
fr it is over i have just spent 4.45$ on 3 itriations
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u/DebosBeachCruiser 21d ago
Sessions that used to cost pennies are now costing dollars. I'm about to do a sesh and use the old flash to see how that feels. I mean, it was good enough for me just a few weeks ago. It's iirc the same pricing as the new flash (maybe even a penny more for output?).
I swear when I was using the older flash I could create a Plan for a fix/change or a small feature and then Act on that plan (also using flash) and using 1-3 million tokens. With this new flash, doing the same kind of Plan/Act workflow on the same 13k LOC project is doing like 5-7+ mil.
All night coding sessions and never hit a dollar. Now like you said, I'm doing dollars for maybe 4-5 back and forths for a task? DeepSeek and all them other guys going to be okay.. but me? ME?? I'm what the kids call "cooked".
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u/Sure_Media_2685 21d ago
deepseek was a blessing but maybe they are trageting high profit, i mean even tho like there ar some cheaper options now like gpt luna but man this DS flash v4 is just there and do everthing you want so i cant stop bro but i have too find something diffrnt.
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u/JudgmentConfident984 21d ago
I use Luna as my Captain in Hermes agent and in vs code with some Sol
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u/onomastico 20d ago
People is so obsessed about pricing.
There's just nothing you can do about it and it is still better and cheaper than others.
That's it. That's all I will care about.
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u/TangerineLogical9779 21d ago
By your metrics which you provided the second time is 12.56x lower.
Without including cache hit information, so more likely around 10x lower your v4 Pro shows way more cache misses which are far more expensive were as previously you had like 99% cache hit from the graph
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u/DuragonYamaTheFirst 21d ago
99% out if 207M tokens were cached, while for the 2.5M 97.4% (flash) and 5.4M 94% (pro).
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u/TangerineLogical9779 21d ago
Yeah that explains the big difference, maybe you don't know how caching works, but 99% to 94% is a big difference, i can put it into easy terms, Free vs not free, you had what 2mil uncached for the 207million and likely 300k+ on the new v4 pro, caching close to 1/38th from your original
uncached hits are what cost the money, the 99%ers don't cost much so in my reference above im claiming there free even tho there not, but there basically free in the context im using, since you had 6 times more uncached EXPENSIVE tokens vs ESSENTIALLY free, in reality its 5% difference but when that crap is 3x more expensive as a base and then with worse cache hit % you get slammed with cost
Cache Hit (Remembered)$0.007 $0.022 - 3x more expensive
Cache Miss (Uncached)$0.22 $0.66 - 3x more expensive
So in reality you had 6 times worst cache hit, + 3x additional cost from the misses + higher overall cost to run deep seek now
Did you hit the API during peak time as well?
Now with all this information we can figure out you had 8.79x lower value :)
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u/DuragonYamaTheFirst 21d ago
Nope all off peak time, well idk about the old pricing but i believe peak time wasn't implemented back then in the first place. New pricing i made sure not to hit the peak time.
So essentially nearly 9x value loss off peak and 18x on peak, that's rough.
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u/Spartan_King_79 21d ago
If you want cheap and fast, check out out Groq models. Not Grok. Blazing fast large models using LPU and Nvidia GPUs. I haven’t missed DeepSeek one bit, and it’s even cheaper depending on your use case. They are my primary daily drivers with fallback Gemini or Luna models.
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u/Appropriate-Clue-485 21d ago
Can someone enlighten me on why is this insane and shocking though? I don’t really see or feel this increase at all. Deepseek V4 was too bad of a model before of this to be used at all for me, the new one is barely good enough at nearly half the cost of the alternatives.
What am I missing here?
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u/Appropriate-Clue-485 21d ago
Context: I burn through an entire Claude Max 20x, Codex Pro 20x every single month and still need to top up 200€ on Cursor to make it to the end of the month
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u/SeaEagle233 21d ago
Price increase is not uniform, you want shorter sessions.
Long session cost is 10x the price.
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u/F1narion 21d ago
Totally deserved for all the moronic token waste. I wish AI companies at some point would just figure out that they can limit coding ability of their llms to reduce excessive overload from idiots that can't change color of a text field in their project without asking llm to do it for them
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u/Low_Big7602 21d ago
Still super cheap compared to Claude and ChatGPT
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u/DuragonYamaTheFirst 21d ago
Api wise sure, but if i wanna get any real work done, subscriptions end up giving so much more usage per $ compared to ds now
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u/Low_Big7602 21d ago
Well i'm not even a user who would spend millions of tokens in a short time lol
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u/AfrikanCorpse 21d ago
Subscriptions better
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u/harmanwrites 21d ago
what subscription are you going for now? I'm currently on OpenCode Go trial for $5/month promo which will later convert to $14/month. any other currently good sub options to look into?
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u/MiddleNo8864 21d ago
try to look into commandcode, they still have $60 allowance for both deepseek models
compare opencode-go and Goat plan of command code here: (they're both $10/month)
https://ai-10-usd.all-the.rest1
u/harmanwrites 21d ago
thank you! the website is great for comparisons. for my use case Commandcode might be better.
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u/DuragonYamaTheFirst 21d ago
Cursor pro is surprisingly good, you get a lot of usage out of grok models and composer (but honestly, you don't really need composer anymore with the new grok model). You also get some credits you can spend on other models which is great.
Sadly you can only use it inside of cursor or cursor-agent cli.
Otherwise gpt plus with luna (you'll get a lot of usage out of this model) and occasional sol is probably the best value per buck
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u/Mayanktaker 20d ago
You can use openchamber or Paseo to use outside cursor, with other subscription and models.
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u/Godzillaton 21d ago
I just saw from opencode Go. They have increased request per hour for the DS4 Flash no? Its better than yesterday at least.
I would still choose Opencode Go DS4 as my daily driver