Directly here: https://platform.deepseek.com/ Easy top-up and pay as you go. Availability and speed are very good and it is the cheaper option.

I've been using DeepSeek directly. I've heard from colleagues that using it via OpenRouter is slower, but I'm not so sure about that.

> does it make a difference

Probably not.

But Opencode-Go is a great solution for those who don't want to pay DeepSeek directly (or can't due to reasons)

Selfish referral code: https://opencode.ai/go?ref=R1AJZT4VBX

For hosted APIs, it's a lot cheaper to use their own infra, caching seems a hell of a lot better there compared to OpenRouter, and indeed the tok/s seems higher. They also have peak/off-peak pricing, so if you can hold off with your request, you get a pretty big discount.

Otherwise, if you're trying to run it locally, even really low quantizations like DeepSeek-V4-Flash-IQ2XXS-w2Q2K-AProjQ8-SExpQ8-OutQ8-chat-v2-imatrix seem to actually not be so dumb compared to smaller models with same quantization, might be worth a try if you're sitting on a lot of RAM/VRAM yet not industry-scale amount :)

I use it directly: https://platform.deepseek.com/usage

3rd party providers on OpenRouter can be cheaper but it's already so cheap.

Opencode-go gives you $60 worth of DS V4 api usage for $10 per month. Right now I think it's hard to exhaust that when using flash exclusively, and plain API use might even be cheaper! Anyway, for DS usage it's a good deal.

OpenCode harness gets the most out of DS V4 Flash model. You can implement any coding task, fast and cheap.

I used it through openrouter. Plugged in to the vs code copilot bring your own key thing.

Played around for a few hours and used up 80 cents of tokens.

Openrouter