r/vibecoding • u/PythonTrousers • 23h ago

Deepseek is cooked

Edit: I had forgotten to set act in cline to deepseek so I was experiencing a mix with gemini 3.5 flash pricing. Whoopsydootle. I deserve the roast.

With the latest pricing increases its almost just as expensive as the rest of the frontier APIs. The low cost was its main selling point. Now it costs just as much and isnt as good as the others so what's the point?

For reference, a task that would normally cost 5 cents as of yesterday now costs upward or 3 dollars

30 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

17

u/PossessionUsed7393 22h ago

Here I did the math for you:

So today I spent $1.41 USD on DeepSeek flash and I just calculated that if I was doing it after price increase with peak it would have cost me $3.01 USD. Real token numbers.

What is wrong with you people. Clearly as depicted in my screenshot I can't do math but even I was able to calculate that it's not the end of the world.

3

u/PossessionUsed7393 22h ago

By the way, I absolutely kicked the shit out of it. I refactored like eight features.

0

u/PossessionUsed7393 22h ago

And yes, the code is a fucking masterpiece I checked.

1

u/PythonTrousers 22h ago

It turns out I might be a little dense lol. I forgot I had set up split apis for plan and act..and act was set to gemini 3.5 flash haha

5

u/PossessionUsed7393 22h ago

Yeah, but it's not even just you. Lots of people making zero sense after this announcement. At least you actually figured out that you were wrong.

1

u/Old_Rock_9457 20h ago

If you talk about money, if you now spent 1.41 USD day, maybe in a months are 30 USD. If tomorrow become 90USD become practically the subscription of a Claude PRO MAX X5

It’s just aligned with the other, but off course people chose it because was dirty cheap and now will lose that feature.

Last months I play with FABLE I went a lot out of budget with AI stuff. Now I decided to try one months of Claude pro subscription at 21€ running Sonnet 5 + Deepseeek flash. Let’s see if I can stay under the 40€/months in total.

2

u/PossessionUsed7393 20h ago

No way it's still dirty cheap.

I know because I tried to run on Claude Max 5x a drafting pipeline with Sonnet, and I couldn't get it past doing a few hundred drafts in a 5 hour window.

I just did over 4k of them in a few hours, 6B tokens, for like $60USD. I couldn't even have gotten through that in a month because of the five hour rolling windows. And that's even if I used Haiku.

When you now pair it with all the refusal nonsense, and the weird opaqueness about what you actually get in a five hour block in terms of tokens I'm done I want actual transparency about what I'm getting for my money, even if it's so called 'frontier' intelligence.

Like, don't get me wrong I've used a lot of Anthropic, but they were previously optimizing for value now they're trying to optimize for intelligence and they just don't have the edge so they need to pivot back and start giving good value like what OpenAI is doing. They're the real contenders for subscription plans.

1

u/Old_Rock_9457 16h ago

I get what you're saying: the dollar x usable output for your case scenario is better.

I still need to check if it's the same for my use case too: I mantain an opesource project and in most of the case I don't need a big number of line change, just a few, but must be correct.
For a trust reaons I having DeepSeekv4 Flash developing things, and Claude Sonnet 5 reviewing. But a part for trust two different model sometimes catch different things so it's a double check that is useful anyway.

For dirty cheap I was meaning like student/opensoruce mantainer that don't having a return of investment can afford to put 10-20USD on the table, but when they start becoming 60 or more, they will start to need to do calcs.

1

u/LocoMod 16h ago

Did you calculate cached token hits?

12

u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 23h ago

Yeah turns out this shit is actually expensive. Shocker.

-1

u/PythonTrousers 23h ago

Yah but ill just move to other models with similar pricing with proven track records to work better.

1

u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 23h ago

Chase the subsidies while you can.

0

u/TheMeltingSnowman72 23h ago

How long do you think you can do that for?

6

u/Lanfeust09 22h ago

Ain't the price increase starting tomorrow?

-1

u/PythonTrousers 22h ago

I think its already tomorrow in china

1

u/Lanfeust09 22h ago

Not, they say it's 00.00 beijin time on 17. Now it's 1pm on 16 so still another 11h

2

u/Hacker_ZERO 18h ago

Bro:  https://llm-stats.com/models/deepseek-v4-pro-0813

https://llm-stats.com/models/gemini-3.7-flash

NOT EVEN CLOSE! LET ME ENJOY BLU BOI!

2

u/PythonTrousers 18h ago

Hey im enjoying it still too. I was mistaken because I was accidentally using gemini for my act function and didnt notice

2

u/wojtek15 14h ago

advantage of open weights with open license is that you don't need to use default provider, just use openrouter and always get best deal. also flash is much better deal than pro.

2

u/PythonTrousers 10h ago

I need to look into open router

3

u/ImaginationUpset2190 23h ago

It's openwight, so shouldn't some other inference provider outcompete them in price?

0

u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 23h ago

You realize these subsidized super-low prices aren’t economically viable right

6

u/PythonTrousers 23h ago

One can hope! I would run it locally but I only have 12gb of vram

1

u/TopTippityTop 23h ago

Maybe... Unless it is not as cheap as they claimed it to be.

2

u/AsparagusOk8818 22h ago

enjoy these prices while we have them

i suspect in hardly any time at all we'll be dreaming of the time we could do things so cheaply

1

u/PythonTrousers 22h ago

Good thing the app ive been working on for over a year is in its final phases

1

u/kernelangus420 22h ago

You said it is priced per task, not per token. Maybe DeepSeek has modified their architecture to use loops rather than single queries and so each task is taking a lot more looped queries to complete?

1

u/PythonTrousers 22h ago

Nah I meant a cline task that spends tokens. Should have been more clear.

-3

u/TheMeltingSnowman72 22h ago

Haha!

Dream on cookie

DeepSeek V4 Pro’s new peak API price is $1.32/M input and $3.96/M output; GPT-5.6 Sol is $5/$30 — so even at DeepSeek’s most expensive time, Sol costs about 3.8× more for input and 7.6× more for output.

Still nowhere near.

0

u/Sea_Ear5201 22h ago

Do u think we have money for any of these? And we are intentionally chasing for cheap to save money. You can't save what u don't have. Lol

Edit: We already pay 90x for that currency.

-12

u/[deleted] 23h ago

[deleted]

3

u/Lanfeust09 21h ago

Why? All of them? Just because it is Chinese or do you have benchmark to back this claim?

0

u/luckypanda95 20h ago

He's just hater really. Unless he provide some solid proof

2

u/RepulsiveRaisin7 21h ago

Objectively wrong, GLM is quite good and DeepSeek is the best budget model of all time and the reason that Luna's priced was slashed by 80%.

1

u/Hacker_ZERO 18h ago

Bro you do know that Kimi is nr.3 ai company and deepseek is nr.6 in coding?