Yes, but even the cheapest providers on OpenRouter are charging at least 10x what DeepSeek does for cached input tokens, which is where DeepSeek gets most of the cheapness.

This would be more convincing if those providers had converged on a number that was not the exact pricing of DeepSeek themselves. Clearly DeepSeek is setting the price here and without them holding it down I expect increases.

The most expensive defines the price. Others need to be just slightly cheaper.