alt Hacker NewsHow does the cost compare using the API vs the $20/month plans with other providers?
I did some back of the envelope calculations and it seems like you would pay $5/month using DeepSeek directly or $15-20 with OpenRouter or similar. But would be interested to hear real world usage.
Replies
stavros • today at 10:52 PM
I've been using it pretty extensively over a month and I'm at maybe $7. It thinks for quite a while, but the results have been better than Sonnet for me.
It is still more expensive per-request than the common Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions, but the math changes a lot based on your specific use case. https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/...
But as usual, there are far cheaper subscriptions with higher limits than Anthropic and OpenAI, that also provide DeepSeek v4 Pro. So you should use those subscriptions first until you max them out, then look at a different subscription.