Comment by 827a

In the statement "we got half a percent of Google's marketshare with a model we're literally giving away for free" the term "we're" here refers to the conglomeration of "DeepSeek" (for making a model small enough to be capable of being hosted for free) and the model providers who do offer it for free (why they do this is... unknowable). It does not refer to OpenRouter, who are merely middlemen.

My original DeepSeek v4 Flash token counts spanned all providers of that model, both paid and free; I merely pointed out the free provider to substantiate a point that DeepSeek's product may be so bad that they could quite literally give it away and people would still prefer to pay (a lot) to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Why this is the case, I leave as a exercise to the reader; I'm just citing numbers and facts.