alt Hacker NewsNew Deepseek models are like Christmas for me. Really big fan of low cost API models, noone does it better than DS. Until VRAM price is low enough to run models locally, this is the way to go.
The subsidized subscription model won't last, API pricing "feels" closer to a true sustainable business model.
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I would bet that Deepseek API pricing is still more cost effective per token than the subscriptions. With the increase in quality Deepseek Flash just got (in my personal testing so far, it seems to have improved a lot at following instructions, and has become more proactive), there really isn’t anything that can match it in terms of cost effectiveness.
I have one of my projects on DeepSeek and it blows my mind how I can use tens of millions of tokens for pennies.
I don't find it suitable for everything, but there's some tasks it crushes for what feels like almost free.
FWIW, looking at pricing myself, it needs to 5x the tokens to get the same results as GPT 5.6 Luna at a much lower TPS. (doesn't obviate the fact that the pressure causes incumbents to push and push to optimize, thank you Deepseek!)
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Indeed. My fellow software engineers keep complaining about using up all their Claude tokens within an hour... Whilst I'll be rocking DS flash for the entire day. Sure it gets a few things wrong here and there, but that's when you pull out the Claude models or whatever for those tricky tasks.