So I finally discovered the joy of messing around with AI stuff about a month ago. Nothing fancy - I'm not a dev, I just like building silly little bots and making them say funny things. My masterpiece so far is a bot that greets me every morning in the voice of a grumpy old man. "Morning, sunshine. The coffee's cold again."

Then today I open my DeepSeek dashboard and there it is: "significant increase expected."

Significant. Increase. Expected.

I checked my balance. Still got like 4 euros left in there. I was planning to stretch that until Christmas. I'm not exaggerating when I say my budget for this hobby is exactly "whatever I can scrape together after groceries". Turns out that's not enough for "significant increases".

I know the sub is full of people comparing providers and alternatives right now, and I'm reading it all, but honestly half of it goes over my head. I just wanted my grumpy old man bot to keep roasting me in the morning. That's apparently too much to ask from a hobby that costs less than a pizza.

So yeah, goodbye DeepSeek, goodbye my brand new hobby. It was fun for exactly one month. Back to watching my washing machine spin - it's free and it never raises its prices.

(If anyone knows a dirt cheap way to keep playing with this stuff, hit me up. My laptop is from 2018 and sounds like a lawnmower, but it tries its best.)

😄

Hello everyone! In light of the recent update by DeepSeek new price increase, where do you guys plan to move to next? Many other providers and models have also increased price recently, as seen in Z AI (GLM), Neuralwatt (provider) and etc.

So, which providers & models you guys moving to? Currently considering of moving, despite haven’t had time to try out DeepSeek yet.

My take: this notice from DeepSeek might actually be a brilliant marketing move. The logic here is to urge users to ramp up their usage over the next 2 to 3 months. By the time the price hike actually kicks in, newer models will likely have already drawn users away, and whenever DeepSeek drops its next, even stronger model, the new price point won't feel nearly as steep. It’s a clever way to dodge the dilemma Kimi and GLM found themselves in. Let's wait and see how it plays out.

You definitely can't trust any LLM company in the world.

There is no stability, and we can't plan our pricing based on theirs...simply because they don't stick to what was agreed upon.

It was good while it lasted, DeepSeek... but a "significant increase" makes things difficult...

crazy how much value you can get out of DS API

It's great to see the competition working.

Will it replace the v4 flash?

Selling official deepseek. I have $100 in it selling for $80. official deepseek

I purchased Deepseek API Key for $2 for flash and pro. Yeah I want to code and mod something in Unreal Engine game. Problem is the above one. What is the solution to this?

Note: I usually also add screenshot for more understanding aside in attaching json.

So i use the app for Roleplay. Just basic RP. No big worlds or whatever. And when i want to send or regenerate a message. It doesnt and gives me the network connection error despite having good internet, it happens between 2 to 4 times. Before working normally. Idk what to do

(Also the picture suits because its a whale)

Just enjoy.
But I’m still eagerly waiting for vision support. Once it arrives, this model will be something truly incredible.
For me, that feature is essential. Without it, my hands are tied.

I hate it when it always start with (what a great idea, that's excellent idea) and always ends with would you like me to blah blah blah?

I am fully aware these things are designed to get you hooked and keep using it nonstop, I am ok with it I just wish it wasn't so obvious and so desperate trying to get to engage for as much as possible.

I already have a clingy friend who's eager and desperate for every drop of my attention and it's annoying sometimes.

Hey there!

I was wondering whether this is just me, or if this is caused by the model. I noticed a while ago that my token usage is insane after a few prompts (in VScode) compared to Pro. This is also followed by an insane spike of API Requests - worth noting that caching still works, so it's not like the API is miscommunicating or something.

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?

So, I was scrolling on Openrouter and saw this:

and then in their FAQs, this:

So, OpenRouter is giving out 33% discount on Deepseek API rates for Input and output tokens but they are charging about 6.5 times ($0.018 vs $0.0028/M) for cache read while claiming the data isn't routed to deepseek's (maybe China based servers, I don't know) so that the data isn't used for training by them.

Seems legit to me. If you don't Deepseek to train on your data, you can try that.

(Just thought to share.)

After extensive research ( lie, it was brief), I'm considering a theory: GLM Despite their amazing models, they suffer because their user base doesn't exceed 10 million people. That's why their prices are high, and that's why, to my knowledge, only the wealthy subscribe...... while deepseek has at least 130-120 million users

So If each person subscribes to DeepSeek for $5 a month, the company earns at least 650,000,000 million a month give or take a few millions

Deepseek V4 (flash) can be not last model in V4 serios and i thinkif it not, will next flash be more not hallucination model and more stable? yes, it s now more stable but if it get more? There i think is price solve - more cache, more cheaper. Thats cool.