I'm all in for saving money and _can_ move to using DS directly from them, but maybe I am missing something here:

OpenRouter Pricing:

$0.02/M input tokens $0.60/M output tokens

DeepSeek Pricing (cache miss, off-peak):

$0.15/M Input $0.60/m output

DeepSeek trains on your inputs. That's why people go on OpenRouter and choose ZDR providers.

One of the reasons I use OpenRouter is because they offer zero data retention. As far as I can tell, DeepSeek's own API doesn't support ZDR.

Just pin your config to a single provider, or several providers with the params `order` and `allow_fallbacks: false`. I regularly get ~98-99% cache hit rates with OpenCode. And some providers are much faster than DeepSeek; I was getting 200-300 tokens/second the other day with Together as my provider.

It's regrettable that OpenRouter doesn't even try to pin you to a single provider per session, but once you know about it, it's a problem that's easily solved.

Or.. BYOK Deepseek because OpenRouter's UX is much nicer?

Zero Data Retention and not having company source code leak to "CHINA!" (said in Trumps annoying voice) would be two reasons not to