It really depends on caching and your use case.

My deepseek bill for the last 30 days was $2.91 for 354 million tokens for agentic coding. My heaviest usage month was $14.97 for a billion tokens at deepseek. If you are doing turn based agentic coding, 90ish percent of tokens or more are cache hits.

I have another use case for deepseek that does not hit caching at all, and I pay $2 for 12 million tokens every month. I could get that down by choosing slower providers, but speed matters for this use case and saving $.50 doesn’t.

Both those use cases are bursty. I can’t sit and wait for a server to chew through my requests, especially with my non-cache use case. Anything less than 200t/s output and I start looking for a different host.

As far as quants, direct from deepseek is full quant. Good providers tell you the quant. Even the budget ones typically won’t go as low as iq3, though. FP4 seems to be the lower limit of providers that I see.

I would love nothing more than for local models to be up to snuff, but for my purposes, they get blown out of the water on all fronts by api access. Your machine has a payoff measured in multiple years (assuming you can build it for that price: $300 worth of ram is not much unless you go for ddr3, and a $500 gpu is pretty minimal) and would be a really poor fit for what I’m doing. It seems to be a great fit for you, and that’s pretty awesome.