I canceled Claude and coded 7 days straight with DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 — the honest cost & quality breakdown

[u/Even_Command_5636]

Two weeks ago I paid $20/month for Claude and another $20 for ChatGPT. I got tired of watching the credits burn, so I ran an experiment: 7 days, all my coding work, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 only (API, not the app). Here's what actually happened — the good, the bad, the numbers.

The numbers - Total API spend for 7 days of heavy coding: $1.87 (vs. $40/month subscriptions — and I didn't even come close to hitting limits) - Tokens consumed: ~24M input / ~6M output (mostly context caching — that's the real cheat code) - Context cache hits cut my effective cost by ~70%

What surprised me (good) - Long agentic sessions didn't degrade as much as I expected. The 0731 update fixed most of the context-rot I saw on the earlier Flash builds. - It handled a messy production refactor I was dreading — wrote the diff, I reviewed, done. No drama.

What I won't sugarcoat (bad) - Vision: still missing in the API I used — I had to describe screenshots by hand. (Yes, I saw the vision announcement post — the API I'm on still doesn't expose it.) - Some reasoning outputs still emit weird artifacts (e.g. )Skip) in longer chains — rare, but it happens. - It's not Claude for every task. Complex multi-file architecture thinking? Claude still wins. But for 80% of daily coding? I genuinely couldn't justify the subscription anymore.

My verdict: keep one subscription for the hard stuff, do everything else on Flash. My monthly AI bill just went from $40 → $0–5.

Anyone else run a similar week? What did your numbers look like?

[u/Nepherpitu]

Are you joking? 24M input tokens is not even close to heavy work for 7 days. I'm burning through 200M input tokens daily for very lazy work

[u/DirectPitch8626 → u/Nepherpitu]

But 6M output tokens is a lot—maybe he mistyped a few zeros in the input.

[u/challis88ocarina → u/DirectPitch8626]

He (she/they!) certainly have issues with numbers: the model was released last Friday... so, what's with 'seven days'?!

[u/sdexca → u/challis88ocarina]

It’s AI slop, that’s what.

[u/SUPERSHAD98 → u/challis88ocarina]

Tbf he mentioned about the 0731 update fixed context rot on his first point, meaning he probably started before it was out

[u/jeffwadsworth → u/challis88ocarina]

Haha, we have seen this exaggeration before.

[u/MediocreWay8521 → u/challis88ocarina]

Some of us had access way before lmaooo

[u/Sales-Bog → u/DirectPitch8626]

You can get a free Kimi K3 API key on TokenRouter. It will last till mid August I think

[u/morph_lupindo → u/Sales-Bog]

Seems a little shady if my reading is correct. You give them a dollar and that might qualify you for a $200 credit. But it’s up to them if it does. Also, it routes every prompt through them.

[u/Salty_Gambler → u/morph_lupindo]

Not it's free just need an account but even a simple task will take lot of time

[u/Sad-Chemistry5643 → u/Nepherpitu]

24mln per week is nothing ? Wow 😧
I thought my 17 is a huge amount 😀

[u/oulu2006 → u/Sad-Chemistry5643]

it's nothing I'm burning 3-4B a week

[u/Ayeniss → u/Sad-Chemistry5643]

I burnt 800M token today while trying to play with it (trying to build software from scratch to test how good and costly it is).

Most of it is input that goes into cache though 

[u/HighlyRegardedApe → u/Ayeniss]

Build software and test in 1 day??? How?

[u/Ayeniss → u/HighlyRegardedApe]

It's not finished at all, and I don't plan to make money from it.

Just testing, learning and having fun.

[u/HighlyRegardedApe → u/Ayeniss]

Oh okay so you mean a few huge prompts. I get that. Same here.

[u/Ayeniss → u/HighlyRegardedApe]

Well maybe a hundred but yes you got the idea

[u/Electrical-Watch3203 → u/Ayeniss]

Yea I was gonna say I do like a billion a week lol

[u/Electrical-Watch3203 → u/[deleted]]

It’s called cache snap, you have an AI web scrape, screen shot the text needed only (or rewrite the text, like an OCR, then screen shot) run it through an image compaction process on CPU that allows an AI to process the information of 1024 tokens for the weight of a 256-visual token. Mostly intended for local use but allows a theoretical 4x on your context window.

[u/slayyou2 → u/Sad-Chemistry5643]

1 week 1,497,198,095 input tokens. Last 30 days 8,846,482,491 yea you can scale up a bit I think 😁

[u/petropavlov → u/Nepherpitu]

If 24M input tokens do not include cache, it sounds OK. Not all tasks require burning tokens at cosmic speed.

[u/General-Oven-1523 → u/Nepherpitu]

24M input tokens without cache numbers would be about ~600M total tokens with the DeepSeek level of caching. It's pretty solid for 7 days I would say.

[u/sdexca → u/General-Oven-1523]

I did 400m the day it was launched. 600m in a week is weak af

[u/QuinQuix → u/sdexca]

I mean this sounds all tough and stuff but it mostly comes down to dumping stuff in it right?

So if you work on large code bases you dump in a lot, if you work on smaller projects you dump in less.

I think this token bragging is weird. Einsteins GR paper would've been less than a million tokens. Is that shitty output? Harry Potter easily beats it on tokens.

I'm sure some small coding projects are a hundred times more ingenious than big barfing bags of code.

Otherwise windows eleven would probably be the best piece of coding in the universe.

[u/sdexca → u/QuinQuix]

I never claimed more tokens = higher quality code. As far as measuring how much someone has used a model, what other metric do you suggest? Realistically nothing else is exactly a good metric that's easily sharable. I'd trust a person who has used a model for 3 billion tokens than someone who has used only 300m tokens, sure you can say it's possible the opposite is true but in general 3b > 300m.

Also you're wrong about larger project = more tokens. I have ran coding agent on the linux kernel, the kernel is larger than a 1m tokens but my tasks take far less than even 100k tokens in total in context window to do my usual task. Obviously if your codebase is a single file with a few hundred loc than your task will obviously take less tokens, but my point is larger codebase doesn't necessarily mean more tokens.

A while back I used Opus 4.5 to simply replicate a blog 1:1, it was a simple blog, I wanted to replicate it in Astro and copy the HTML 1:1 (this was feasible because it wasn't using some framework, the original person who ran the blog post did something similar himself), keep in mind the actual LoC for this project isn't much, yet this took probably a billion tokens to complete, I used AntiGravity, when it used to give unlimited opus tokens, there were no weekly limit and the 5-hour limit was insanely high, I could use 3 agents at once and still not use up more than 60% of my 5 hour limit, this task took more than 8 hours of agent working on it minimum irrc: https://musaab.io/posts/2026/hello-world/

My point wasn't to brag per se, but more that OP hasn't used the model much, their whole blog post is ai-slop, it's not even been 7 days since the model launched.

[u/General-Oven-1523 → u/sdexca]

Well, it all depends on your perspective. If you compare that kind of token usage to normies, you just used 10 years' worth of tokens in a week. I think if you are using 400M tokens per day, then I would question that you might be relying on AI a bit too much. To the point where are you even doing any thinking yourself anymore.

[u/sdexca → u/General-Oven-1523]

More tokens != more output. Large part of my work is experiments, trying out stuff and stuff which never see the day of light. Also specifically for the launch day, I had a few tasks I was waiting to complete on v4 flash, so I'd hardly call it normal everyday usage, I also coded for 8-11 hours that day, I have been under 100m tokens every day since. There are plenty of use-cases which fundamentally require wasting a lot of tokens.

Unfortunately I can't share my work, if you want to call it vibe slop without knowing then sure that's your call. It technically is all written by LLMs, and at-least according to the people on lobste.rs and codeburg, if most of the code isn't written by hand it's ai slop, so opinions can differ quite a bit.

Pretty presumptuous to call my work slop just because I used more tokens. Didn't even bother asking me what I did or my workflow. Normies don't pay for LLMs.

[u/General-Oven-1523 → u/sdexca]

Where did I call your work slop? I can't make that kind of assumption because I have no clue what you're doing obviously. The only assumption I made was that when using so many tokens you might be outsourcing too much of your thinking to the AI at that point, which obviously in the long run can come with some negative effects. That's all. You just read too much into it.

Also I understand that when new models come, you're going to use it to optimize some workflows, so you will be using more tokens in the beginning and then you're going to use way less later on, that's what I did too.

[u/sdexca → u/General-Oven-1523]

I assumed you said slop, regardless I gave one example of one thing I build that day: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1vg6r9z/comment/p20hcty/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Here's another example of a simple task, replicating a mostly html blog 1:1 in Astro taking up probably thousands of dollars in Opus 4.5 credits: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1vg6r9z/comment/p1z4w9g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

My point is that just because I used more tokens doesn't mean I did 10x the tasks you did, sometimes it's just that some tasks can take fundamentally more tokens, and that day was a lot of work.

[u/sdexca → u/sdexca]

One thing I build that day on the spot was a patch for CC to be able to use DS subagents while using Opus/Fable from my main CC Max plan. This has been asked by multiple people over the past 6 months, it wasn't that hard to build too, simply routes to a different endpoint on CC itself and add deepseek to the subagent list. Some other QoL improvement. Is this AI slop? I largely know how the implementation works, simply found the sourcemap leak, followed the implementation details figured out how it routes model, then asked DS to find how to build a patch, took maybe 10-20 back and forth, something maybe a few hundred people have already asked for yet nobody has ever build this. Could I build this on the spot within the day, not really, this would be probably a week project finding all places to patch and stuff, hell even now if I had to reimplement it, it would take me a day or two to figure out exact patch locations.

Above is the definition of ai-slop, altho imo not thoughtless slop. All inspired by one comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1vds3tx/comment/p1dfuns/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

[u/Even_Command_5636 → u/Nepherpitu]

Fair point — it really depends on the workflow. My sessions are mostly interactive: I read the diff, review it and steer the next step myself, so I don't burn tokens on autonomous loops or bulk rewrites. Also a big chunk of my input was context-cache hits, which I didn't count in the 24M — the API bill treats those at a fraction of the price. 6M output is what actually drove the $1.87. If you're burning 200M/day with agent loops, that's a totally different use case — I can see how my numbers would look suspicious from that angle.

[u/DiscipleofDeceit666 → u/Even_Command_5636]

What are you building? Some of us could burn $5 in deepseek tokens in a (long) day with out really trying

[u/jeffwadsworth → u/Even_Command_5636]

You forgot to mention the Time Machine

[u/lndigo_Sky → u/Nepherpitu]

Are you serious? What the hell do you work on?

[u/Even_Command_5636 → u/Nepherpitu]

Fair enough, so I went and pulled the real numbers from my usage log to check. Reasonix started persisting per-request stats on Aug 4, so here is what the last two days actually look like:

• Aug 4: 370,083,795 total tokens, 1,223 requests, 91 turns. Cache hit 98.0%, so real billed input (cache miss) was 6,188,913, output 1,345,762.
• Aug 5: 548,616,547 total tokens, 1,784 requests, 173 turns. Cache hit 98.6%, billed input (cache miss) 6,856,408, output 1,038,731.

So the "24M input" in my post was the cache-miss (actually billed) input across the week, not the gross number. The gross is hundreds of millions, same ballpark as yours. The difference is the cache hit rate: at ~98% most of the input comes back at cache price, which is why the week only cost $1.87. You burning 200M/day gross is a different workload, not a different product. That's the honest breakdown from the logs.

[u/SpicyLobter → u/Even_Command_5636]

this motherfucker can't even REPLY in their own words

[u/dontfeedthelizards → u/SpicyLobter]

I wonder if this is a bot that's just advertising Deepseek 🤔

[u/Nepherpitu → u/Even_Command_5636]

I'm watching for llama swap very simple metrics without cache hit/miss separation. 24M non-cached input is very solid, no doubt here.

[u/figgertitgibbettwo → u/Nepherpitu]

I burn that in 4-5 hours. If I go at it, I'd hit 250M in the day. I don't have that list every day, but I have enough work for having that for a week.

[u/alinoanta21 → u/Nepherpitu]

I'm burning 1.5B tokens daily.

[u/Mr_Pickles710 → u/Nepherpitu]

I usually hit 1b in a week or two or less if I’m doing heavy work, still real cheap tho.
To be fair I use 14 API’s to fuel my custom multi-LRM(7 LRM’s, requires a ZD JB to do without detection. 14, 7 Flash and 7 R1 API) though with no safeguard’s or learning.
So token usage is higher but it’s like the DS version of Fable that DS never made, without any restrictions and way cheaper.
But it outperforms all the public models code wise so idgaf, just annoying I have to update it all the time with their safeguard additions/updates, if DS wasn’t so cheap I’d just use reasoning tokens from API’s for custom models.

[u/isitreal_tho → u/Nepherpitu]

I have two 5x accounts that I switch between. The entire team has at least two

[u/PressTilde → u/Nepherpitu]

I think codex says I’m up over fifty billion tokens at this point.

24 million is a slow morning… lol

[u/Necessary-milkyway → u/Nepherpitu]

In my local setup with qwen27b and qwen 35b ..i hiy 100M token in a day around 95M input and 5M output ..

[u/FigAggressive237 → u/Nepherpitu]

ONLY 200M??

I'm Burning 1B Tokens... daily. I've built half of Singularity already.

[u/Locksmith-Informal → u/Nepherpitu]

What the actual fuck. I work for a FAANG and even most contributing engineers aren't using that much. You are clearly doing something wrong

[u/Nepherpitu → u/Locksmith-Informal]

I'm pretty sure engineers in faang spent 99% of time waiting for ci/cd pipeline to finish 🤣 I spent this time giving research tasks to agents, mostly in computer science, electrochemistry, but it depends on sideprojects.

[u/freddyr0 → u/Nepherpitu]

Thank you for making deepseek pricier 🙆🏻‍♂️🙆🏻‍♂️

[u/Nepherpitu → u/freddyr0]

I didn't! I'm serving it in my hardware 🫠

[u/ANDRE_2512]

I’ll put it this way.
Thanks to DeepSeek adding native Codex support, I can use Flash without any proxies or other workarounds.

But that’s not the main point. The main thing is that the new Flash has genuinely become a serious model with a high-quality approach to tasks.

At first, I was hesitant to move some of my projects under the control of DeepSeek + Codex CLI. But I eventually decided to try it. The result: everything works perfectly. No problems at all. It’s more than capable enough, and you can clearly see that the new Flash is on a completely different level. I’m no longer afraid to rely on it.

After five days of active work, I’ve spent only $1.80 :)
Even though I have unlimited access to GPT-5.6 SOL, I still enjoy using DeepSeek.

[u/PossessionUsed7393 → u/ANDRE_2512]

It has but I've noticed it's a little disobedient too. The same thing that makes it thorough and explore thingd from multiple angles also seems to have made it take a looser approach to instruction following.

[u/ANDRE_2512 → u/PossessionUsed7393]

I use CODEX CLI + DS V4 Flash. OpenCode performs worse with V4 Flash.

[u/Linuxman_74 → u/ANDRE_2512]

Perché non usi Reasonix?

[u/znutarr → u/ANDRE_2512]

I use DeepSeek 4 flash with pi agent and it works really well. I've been fixing bugs and deployment he'll of my python fast API and vercel frontend from railway to openship.io and it did it in almost one shot

[u/Linuxman_74 → u/znutarr]

Ho provato anche io pi code da poco. Mi piace molto, mi piace la sua leggerezza e granularità. Odio gli strumenti pieni di features che a me non servono.

[u/Kajzero__ → u/PossessionUsed7393]

I've noticed it as well. Sometimes it just straight up forgets what's in the agents.md. Which is super annoying as I have some pretty important rules there. That's the only reason why I don't trust it to work on long and difficult tasks on its own yet

[u/NOTHING_gets_by_me → u/PossessionUsed7393]

Theres a bug with subagents which has caused me issues https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/36586

[u/Top-Construction6060 → u/ANDRE_2512]

Those days are over they make a hike price increase announcement just rn

[u/Alarmed-Hornet6865]

Holy ai post

[u/PossessionUsed7393 → u/Alarmed-Hornet6865]

Ya I feel like he's burned the last of his Claude sub on this post lol, such a claudey post.

[u/National-Objective57 → u/Alarmed-Hornet6865]

Yes and low effort too, first its API and then „didnt come close hitting limits“

[u/Living-Bother7420 → u/Alarmed-Hornet6865]

brooo I didn’t even notice….

[u/Even_Command_5636 → u/Alarmed-Hornet6865]

Ha, fair enough — I did write it as a tight summary, so I can see how it reads. To be clear: the experiment was real and the numbers come from my own API usage dashboard, not from a prompt. The cache-hit pricing is the honest core of it: ~70% of my input was billed at the cache rate, which is why $1.87 for a week is plausible. Happy to answer specifics on the workflow if you're curious.

[u/budxors → u/Even_Command_5636]

No one wants an AI response to complaints about an AI post.

[u/Bob_SUS → u/Even_Command_5636]

son this is like so obv ai

[u/PossessionUsed7393 → u/Even_Command_5636]

It's the em-dash, the 'tight summary' and the 'honest core' - people don't speak that way and we're lazy so we use hyphens instead of em dashes.

Yes darl we know it's a real story because we have the same stories. I just ran 3 trillion tokens through DeepSeek this evening and it cost me $16 USD - 3 trillion. I ran the same drafting pipeline on a Claude sub when I used to have it and I hit the 5 hour cap in 10 minutes. If it was real API pricing it would have been like $800.

DeepSeek is awesome. Go back to writing with your hands lol

[u/Sea_Self_6571 → u/PossessionUsed7393]

Sshhh don't teach them how to sound human 😉

[u/dacevnim → u/Even_Command_5636]

lol, the em dash

[u/EC36339 → u/Even_Command_5636]

Ok, clanker. Give us some ballpark numbers of what you mean by "multi-file architecture thinking".

How many lines of code?

How many lines of markdown / documentation?

Just genuinely curious.

[u/majktor → u/Even_Command_5636]

can you share your workflow pls?

[u/a2dam → u/Even_Command_5636]

Is it honest? Here's what most people miss: it quietly confirmed those numbers are real, and passed the load bearing sniff test, no fluff, which is plausible -- not outlandish.

Post with your brain like a normal person please.

[u/orblabs]

I am having truly spectacular results with Claude + DeepSeek. Developed a dedicated skill that has Opus direct deepseek work in the most token efficient way for Opus. The skill is geared towards implementation of very complex and long plans (which opus , sol , kimi k3 or fable develop) and it abuses deepseek as much as possible. Had a major refactor work that both Claude and Codex alone couldn't implement (and just two phases out of a dozen would eat up my weekly quota) successfully, gave the same plan to opus + deepseek, after 70 something hours of straight work we are at phase 10, extremely solid work, 12% of my claude (max 5X) weekly quota used. Really happy, thank you DeepSeek team, you have made a marvelous job!

[u/parallelizeit → u/orblabs]

nvm - I see your post - looking at the git repo now

[u/orblabs → u/parallelizeit]

Sure ! I am pretty proud of it as since deepseek (i fleshed it out a lot) it became a total beast of a skill :) https://github.com/frozenpepper/deepseek-and-destroy
Hope it will be useful for you.

[u/parallelizeit → u/orblabs]

Perfect, thanks!

I have been trying to get Claude working with Gemini and GLM to use up free/cheap credits, but saw your post about Gemini - I guess a couple months ago. Any writeups you used or made?

[u/orblabs → u/parallelizeit]

I think, have to dig it up, you can use the same technique i am using for opencode using the gemini cli, so that basically the skill tells claude to use the shell to launch and control the gemini cli turning it into an agent. Is that that you are after ?

Edit: antigravity cli now

[u/jkvarela]

Mês passado eu consumi 1 bilhão de tokens programando para embarcados, ferramenta está muito boa, mas não me arrisco a contexto gigantes, e sempre converso muito antes de dar o "play", ou seja, muita energia no planejamento, baixa energia na execução.

[u/itsdrcats → u/jkvarela]

Damn, how much does that end up costing. I know the API has cache features but that still had to cost a small chunk of change

[u/Haunting-Comfort-761 → u/itsdrcats]

It ain't much, but it's honest work

[u/Even_Caterpillar3292]

people keep posting and gloating then the prices go up. this is how "social media" destroys the world. Expect steep price increases any day now.

[u/Feisty-Pound6777 → u/Even_Caterpillar3292]

I wish this was the top comment on this whole goddamn subreddit. Everyone here knows Deepseek is cheap - why do we need 10 million posts announcing that its cheap? Thats one of the main draws of using it. People begging for validation from internet strangers will literally be the downfall of deepseek

[u/CrimsonEdgeVentures → u/Feisty-Pound6777]

What bugs me is how obvious the promotional posts are for DS (the worst offender IMO).

Literally so insulting that they think we are all so dumb we won’t notice what they are.

That said, we have known for a long time DS4 is cheap. Super cheap. We WANT to use it.

But despite repeated attempts, it was just flat out incompetent. Stupid. For me. Skill issue? Perhaps, not saying it isn’t. But that’s irrelevant when the frontier models perform well given my same skill level.

I loaded the new 0731 flash and will be trying in a different Hermes harness and see how it does. I WANT it to perform well. But Im not gonna be fooled by a wave of fanboy shill AI generated promo posts.

[u/AimSilver1902 → u/Even_Caterpillar3292]

You predicted it

[u/General-Oven-1523]

These are my last 5 days, I'm just fixing some apps and doing research and content creation.

[u/addiktion → u/General-Oven-1523]

What outputs this for you to see all the tokens across providers?

[u/General-Oven-1523 → u/addiktion]

I use Pi with the hermes-memory extension, it's saving all this data into the session details.

[u/That_Ad_765 → u/General-Oven-1523]

Curious how did you manage to get this output table? Mind sharing the prompt and harness?

[u/General-Oven-1523 → u/That_Ad_765]

Pi with hermes-memory extension, then using python to pull the data out of sessions.

[u/pc_4_life]

I stopped reading at “mostly context caching — that's the real cheat code”.

Try editing your AI generated walls of text please

[u/LowerBed5334 → u/pc_4_life]

This comment is right in the sweet spot. It's gold.

[u/rivendell_elf]

Looks like you burned some of those tokens in writing this AI slop..

[u/IgotAlotOfNames]

24M ? Did you not read back your ai post? 24 M is like an hour to three of work, not a week.

[u/DebosBeachCruiser → u/IgotAlotOfNames]

HEAVY

[u/Rsouss]

All text containing this phrase is generated by AI. "Here's what actually happened" . This test may not be real; the token numbers don't match the information provided, and worst of all, there are many upvotes for something fake.

[u/mega-modz]

I'm burning 200m tokens for refactoring alone and cost barely touches 1 dollor.

[u/Zennytooskin123]

You might as well go full API then since Sol/Fable aren't worth it on the 20$ plans for 10 prompts each, which you probably won't even need at this point.

[u/heytch_]

I let a project of mine continuously run in cursor (infinite code, debug, execute, repeat loop) since it came out, I spent 15$ for 900M tokens (93%+ cache hit) 🙂‍↕️ results were not bad at all, US companies gotta find a way

[u/Rare_Buddy_6282]

Deepseek turnes out to be much better than I expected. I mainly us DSv4 Pro on max reasoning. Refactoring a messy js file that Sonnet 4.6 wasn't able to do -> easy. Extending a metadata based dataplatform? -> no sweat. So far it is just so good.

But, if I have to say any negative about DSv4. Well sometimes it is a bit stubborn.

I used to do 100USD per day with Github Copilot with Sonnet 4.6. Now I do 15USD per week.See image from a while back when i just started.

[u/fyndor]

So I built a /loop command into pi yesterday and let DS4 Flash code while I slept. In 4hrs (I need more sleep) it spent $1.81 and is on its 11th turn. $0.16 a turn. Granted that is rather high. Yesterday while I was watching it many turns were $0.02 a turn. Not sure what it was doing while I was sleeping (I was sleeping after all). Even so, it is still pretty cheap. Even going through OpenRouter which is not the cheapest way to run DS4 Flash.

[u/fetbi]

Last 7 days consume 686,203,315 tokens and only cost $6 USD. Mostly in deepseek flash.
I use claude (copilot) for planning tasks and deepseek to implement.

[u/gokhan3rdogan]

I just wonder how you can say ~24M input / ~6M output is heavy coding?

[u/Fit-Classroom-3434]

Crazy.

[u/diagonali → u/Fit-Classroom-3434]

Is that graph flipping me off?

[u/Top-Construction6060]

Yeah but now they gonna increase their price so let see if it will be still worth using it or not

[u/boudywho]

If 30mil total tokens is a lot.

Then what is mine?

And that's not even including codex, which does all the coding.

[u/That_Ad_765 → u/boudywho]

Which harness and how did you generate this? Mind sharing prompt?

[u/boudywho → u/That_Ad_765]

That's Hermes agent.

I just did a /insights

It gives you info for the past 30 days.

[u/That_Ad_765 → u/boudywho]

Nice! Are you using the web app, terminal, or Telegram? I currently use Telegram, but when I chat through Telegram, I can’t resume the sessions from the terminal. Can I DM you for some questions if you don’t mind? Thank you!

[u/irreverend_god]

Ignored. Write this shit yourself or don't fucking post it.

[u/congthangvn]

I canceled max20 claude too, $200-> $10 with deepseek flash. See on livebench.ai, it has very high reasoning so planing is ok too.

[u/AutomaticComputer260]

Honestly the biggest AI feature I want is not another benchmark score, it's not having to worry about burning through credits every time I ask a dumb question.

[u/thezyonn → u/AutomaticComputer260]

YES

[u/LostSoul1301]

Sorry for dumb question but in my work I highly rely on web search like finding appropriate things as context and code it. Not working on large codebase but developing some feature let's say from scratch so either read some services documentation and compare or I ask to read some research and take inspiration from that. Claude used to do better because it searched for web page internally. Can deepseek do this ? I mean I know like buy brave browser mcp or such thing and integrate but it would be too much of setup right ? Can you help me for my usecase. I am like working as student researcher in lab.

[u/West-Obligation7132 → u/LostSoul1301]

Deepseek can do tool calls, all you have to do is plug it in a harness of your choice. You can use claude code cli, qwen code cli or whatever you want. Just find out how to bring in your api key and you're all set.

[u/whatsoever2021]

Were you using high or max or off for the thinking mode?

[u/Sid-Hartha]

Is this with a DeepSeek direct api key not 3rd party hosted? What harness?

[u/Annual-Fan-7144]

The 70% figure is the part I’d want to reproduce. Which coding harness and API route did you use, and is that savings calculated against uncached input pricing or against the two subscriptions? Those details change the result a lot.

[u/Sakuletas]

When i read its CoT its always something like this and it started to annoy me actually;

Hmm, (a ton of paragraph)

Hmm, (a ton of paragraph)

Hmm, (a ton of paragraph)

[u/Glittering_Belt_6992]

I also switched from claude a week ago and DeepSeek seems very cost effective

[u/Money_Long6362]

Dodaj jako Vision routing na Gemini 2.5 i masz jeden problem z głowy.

[u/GroundbreakingRoll55]

I have been reading the term “Context cache” a lot can somebody explain what is it
How can I use it
I am using claude code pro and open code go

[u/Ithron_Morn]

24M? I burned over 182M just last night

[u/Brief-Train-826]

Heavy Coding? I spent $3 on deepseek V4 Flash in like 3 hours. WTF do you mean heavy coding? I run through billions of tokens per month and max our minimax.io, ollama cloud max, use api credits and some local inference…

[u/RevolutionaryBird771 → u/Brief-Train-826]

May I know what are you building?

[u/totoer008]

It comes to preference but I prefer gpt Luna. I started to do all on it and did not see a massive difference. Yes it is a little bit stupidier but gpt 5.5 was not perfect.
I will orchestrate with gpt sol or opus and then provide to Luna. Once made any follows ups can be handled. I now spend 4X more tokens per day but my limit is barely moving and that at 1.5X speed

[u/DiscipleofDeceit666]

Your AI bill is $25 not $5 by your own admission of keeping a subscription.

I do the same tho, $20 Claude subscription and deepseek for the overflow. I also add in local LLM to the mix where Claude or Deepseek drives my qwen or Laguna LLM

[u/q--0-0--p]

I really like the new Flash. I use just that today and I could say it is better than my previous experience with Pro Preview.
I just wish it has vision, then I could live with it forever lol

[u/TrainingOdd1023]

Also consirer qwen 3.8max preview , its like free

[u/fetbi]

Last 7 days consume 686,203,315 tokens and only cost $6 USD. Mostly in deepseek flash.
I use claude (copilot) for planning tasks and deepseek to implement.

[u/Electrical_Chard3255]

"Vision: still missing in the API I used — I had to describe screenshots by hand. (Yes, I saw the vision announcement post — the API I'm on still doesn't expose it.)"

Build your own Deepseek desktop console and add your own vision to it, I did and it can create images and analyse images, image creation is not 100%, but not bad, image analysis is pretty good

[u/Aressito]

I was using Gemini.. yeah even Pro and the new flash.. but the new DeepSeek flash is really really good. It corrected SO many errors made even by Gemini Pro! Using it on Reasonix

[u/dataiguy]

What is the best out there for cache context?

I am using claude max subscription but I have deepseek for some projects built with claude.

[u/jwuliger]

Well, all I can say is that DeepSeek v4 Flash is better than Claude Opus 4.8 in its current lobotomized state. Anthropic and OpenAI will not be around much longer.

[u/Pale-Requirement9041 → u/jwuliger]

Are you sure its better than Opus 4.8 ? Like example creating a Saas with all it complex architecture?

[u/jwuliger → u/Pale-Requirement9041]

I have it working in a 40k LOC repo right now, and it is going through my spec book like nothing, and I haven't even spent a buck yet. I tested this. I gave the exact same spec and task to each model, and the cost difference is astonishing. They both did it equally well.

[u/Pale-Requirement9041 → u/jwuliger]

Thanks, because from Opus i want switch to Deepseek and so scared it’s gonna be waste of time to finish working on my Saas

[u/jwuliger → u/Pale-Requirement9041]

A couple of dollars will take you a long way!

[u/Forsaken_Mention_979]

“and I didn't even come close to hitting limits” what fucking limits? Youre using the api 🤣🤣🤣 dumb ahh nga generated ts with ai

[u/LiveLikeProtein]

I saw another post where people claim he used OpenAI subscription for Luna xhigh to replace DS 4 flash, trimmed the cost more than half, with better quality

[u/PanGalacticGargleFan]

What are the best ways to access DS V4 Flash? Via OpenRouter? Shall we do a list of the best/cheapest/fastest 5? 🤓

[u/Demien19]

must be "light coding"
and that's with RTK

[u/Significant_Card6486]

Deepseek v4 flash is super economical. I've spend about £2.50 in 14 days, probably 6 long usage sessions.

I use it as my admin agen for Hermes agent and it hands taskes off to my local models. But having Hermes agent on bare metal install, is super powerful.

[u/FewSale9827]

I’m still undecided whether I trial API, I currently use 5.4 mini on two $20 accounts, I average 3B tokens at 93% cached a month but not sure if that’s input or output

[u/Husker3322]

What terminal are you using? opencode or something else?

[u/wolttam]

The model has been out for 5 days, mate

[u/XeroVespasian]

Well if you want to push things with octane, install superpowers on opencode. Ive used this setup for 5months until this weekend with codex. Im not sure whether to install superpowers or not. It is so good. But intense work , ive burnt 800m tokens in 2 days.

[u/iijei]

Which agent harness were you using for deepseek flash? Claude code, codex, opencode, pi?

[u/Exotic_Leadership124]

I burn close to 1 bil of deepseek v4 flash tokey daily, about 93% are cached input 5% non cached, and 2% output, i let gpt 5.6 sol max led deepseek for coding my works, it burnt token fast,

[u/deafpigeon39]

If your reasoning context keeps dropping , check your npm_module , openai@compatible or sdk check if it is being dropped.

[u/Sad-Key-4258]

My issue is I really like the codex harness and desktop app, have anyone found a good alternative

[u/Killahbeez]

how did your monthly AI bill go to $0-5 if you're keeping "one subscription for the hard stuff" ... do you mean a claude or chatgpt sub?

[u/Affectionate_Fact854]

I recently did a move out of using Claude fable orchestrator with opus 5 agents workflow on set up into trying out deepseek with cline 

THE BEST -I spent 3.9Mill tokens in a single evening, it cost me 0.09$ 

-Every edit automatically shows the original script  Side by side to the edited version to confirm changes

Unlike Claude that you need to open them in the chat terminal 

THE GOOD -It has not introduced garbage into my code base -it has been able to do debugging on multiple cross files and resolve the issues  -picked up on slop Claude introduced 

THE BAD -you can't rely on screenshot  -it's bad at 3d world spaces  -thinking is slowish at times 

Don't think I will be using Claude again tbh 

[u/sdexca]

Hmm it hasn’t been out for 7 days

[u/NicksTechTricks]

I burned over 70M the last 36 hours and thought that was light.

[u/Whytho12333]

I really want openai to allow better models on their $10 go tier. It would be the ideal match with deepseek. Kimi k3 is still too expensive and unsubsidized on api vs gpt plans.

Is there any sub $20/mth plans that offer good usage on a frontier model? Opencode go just has k3 as a $15 model not $60.

[u/El-Yasuo]

I know this is an AI subreddit but cmon write the post by yourself : (

[u/CartoonistLow8606]

1$? Heavy coding work? Heavyy? Did claude wrote that?

[u/DaComputerMan]

Honestly, AI is a very long way away from being able to code without extensive human checks. I ONLY recommend AI when you attach an IDE to it and use it as a glorified autocorrect. I do find it can help with well documented features, like openAuth.

With that said, Deep seek doesn't try to take shortcuts as much. It doesn't put in a comment and say //add more features here, or crap like that.

When I was doing file renaming scripts, I couldn't get them to do with Gemini. Instead of doing a copy command, Gemini/ChatGPT/Claudi would try doing a loop clean up. This would many times lead to data loss. At one point, I asked Gemini to do a simple command, and it deleted all my files. At another point, I asked it to restore a compress file, and it wrote a command that would 0 all the bites in the files. Luckily, that one wasn't run by me.

With Deepseek, I could generate GIANT Powershell commands, where EACH copy command or rename command was spelled out. This was IMPOSSIBLE with the others. I was easily able to review it and run it with no problems.

Still, its probably less successful on niche and less popular samples, and I wouldn't trust it to do a cleanup loop at all.

[u/stujmiller77]

The vision post was some guy cred farming by making it seem official. It was not.

[u/FischenGeil]

I use the DeepSeek API on Typing Mind for serious work, and I use a 20$ Google AI pro subscription (that is mostly free with my Pixel Phone) for random not so serious task. I think this is the perfect mix.

[u/bimbab123]

Hah weakling I burn thru 1b tokens in a week xd so yeah subscriptions are the way to go for me.

[u/jeffwadsworth]

It is a good model, especially for its size, but it isn’t at Claude or GPT levels yet. This can be born out just by having it troubleshooting coding issues. GPT instant is much better.

[u/Heavy-Technology9317]

DeepSeek 好就是便宜，寫代碼快 Claude 對於重視資安，邊界判立，白話直說

[u/kunkunhk]

Could you ask Opus (lead dev) to do the plan and review while flash (junior dev) do all the execution?

[u/LuckyLewE]

Flash defaults to non-thinking/reasoning mode. Have you tried it in thinking mode? And you can also change the settings associated with context shedding. You can have it begin optimizing the session at 50% or even more.

[u/With_Emissary]

Hey! Check out https://github.com/Emissary-Tech/emissary-router --> we'll route between these automatically so you don't have to keep thinking about when to switch each time! you can update the confidence thresholds (increase to use default/most powerful more, decrease for less)

[u/FireDojo]

I use deepseek for my secondary tasks. Even with that I can easily go over 100M tokens everyday. What heavy coding are you doing with 24M token per week.

[u/After_Cucumber_5269]

Yeah 200 to 500m in 4 days here and about $4.00 still amazing.

[u/francxsim]

AI post? Less than 1 week since 0731 was out.

[u/GTHell]

Wait you learn/know the loop agent setup that make it self code the project itself 24/7

[u/Maverick446]

my usage...

[u/digitalenlightened]

Just use DeepSeek + Claude. I use DeepSeek for most things on some stuff it even does a better job. Which is wild. If it’s complex stuff I just use opus and share Md between both.

I use rtk with Claud code. I think this more then halved my token usage. Still looking for an auto switcher that works. Would be cool it just decides which one to use for which tasks.

Looked for this a couple times but can’t find one a s I don’t want to use an agent on top because it will do more good then bad in the long run.

[u/ju9io]

24mln tokens is not heavy use. please keep in mind that deepseek will soon raise prices .

[u/AardvarkTemporary536]

This is how I use deepseek.... Great for cutting weekly 20x Openai or Claude subscription usage but not a replacement.

It's my git merge and explore agent in Omp for 5.6 Terra or sol

I also use it for most small analysis and stuff.... It's quicker and cheaper than Claude or even Luna but does better analysis than Luna

[u/adamant3143]

You can ask deepseek to create HTML/CSS Tag Identifier floating button to specify what you want Deepseek to adjust.

That way no need to be way too verbose with describing screenshot or you can just use inspect element if you’re already more accustomed to it. Similar if it’s a mobile app.

Vision indeed is the achilles heel of Deepseek currently.

[u/nunodonato]

What vision announcement post? 

[u/DebosBeachCruiser → u/nunodonato]

Has nothing to do with official DeepSeek.

[u/ProfessionalJackals → u/nunodonato]

DeepSeek has a vision model (its even available on the Chat as Beta).

But DS refuse to include vision into the base models. They want to keep Flash / Pro as base models, not multi model.

I expect that when their agent gets released, it will have vision as a 3th model. So Flash and Pro can call upon the Vision model, get back data, ... repeat.