I just built a pretty complicated OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities) data pipeline, 731 lines of code (excluding comments), DuckDB, etc. for $0.31 in Reasonix. According to Reasonix, I'm averaging 97.90% cached tokens (which are like an order of magnitude cheaper than non-cached). If I worked eight hours every day, at that rate, I'd be spending about $2 to $3 a day. So...yeah, DeepSeek is cheaper, but not, like crazily cheaper than the $100 plan from Anthropic, where I rarely run out of tokens. But, Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing people toward usage-based billing rather than flat rate subscriptions. The free lunch from the big guys is coming to an end, I suspect, at which point, spending $50-$75 a month with DeepSeek begins to seem like a good option.
There are also a bunch of things where the API is the only reasonable way to make use of a model, and DeepSeek makes that easy and cheap, none of the US vendors do. It's extremely expensive to use Anthropic and OpenAI APIs. I'm always trying to find places I can replace Opus API usage with DeepSeek or MiMo or even GLM (though, so far, GLM is also a bit pricey, I guess their coding plans provide API access and make it cheaper, so that might be an option).
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I just built a pretty complicated OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities) data pipeline, 731 lines of code (excluding comments), DuckDB, etc. for $0.31 in Reasonix. According to Reasonix, I'm averaging 97.90% cached tokens (which are like an order of magnitude cheaper than non-cached). If I worked eight hours every day, at that rate, I'd be spending about $2 to $3 a day. So...yeah, DeepSeek is cheaper, but not, like crazily cheaper than the $100 plan from Anthropic, where I rarely run out of tokens. But, Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing people toward usage-based billing rather than flat rate subscriptions. The free lunch from the big guys is coming to an end, I suspect, at which point, spending $50-$75 a month with DeepSeek begins to seem like a good option.
There are also a bunch of things where the API is the only reasonable way to make use of a model, and DeepSeek makes that easy and cheap, none of the US vendors do. It's extremely expensive to use Anthropic and OpenAI APIs. I'm always trying to find places I can replace Opus API usage with DeepSeek or MiMo or even GLM (though, so far, GLM is also a bit pricey, I guess their coding plans provide API access and make it cheaper, so that might be an option).