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Comment by 3stacks

1 day ago

What is stopping you from switching to GLM 5.2 now? Have you tried it out yet?

I'm playing with Deepseek a lot more via OpenRouter recently and the only major downside I can see is the usage billing over the monthly plan

Existing setup. I'm already used to Claude Code I guess. I actually spent time and tokens customizing and fixing it. Have a patcher utility that modifies the binary in order to disable telemetry and remove performance reducing language in the system prompts. Every update I spend some Claude tokens dissecting the newest executable and integrating it with my patcher.

The monthly subscription is also a major hurdle for me. The "high end frontier models for low prices" aspect is a major reason. I think I'm getting a lot of value from my subscription, given that the API prices are like a hundred times higher.

However, there's also a psychological factor here. These subscriptions are like the gachas of the software world. I got "addicted" to them. I developed workflows around achieving 100% weekly usage. Sometimes Anthropic randomly resets weekly usage and I scramble to get the most out of it. I'll point Claude at things and then just have it run hundreds of code review agents. I ran out of projects to do this on and started doing it to my favorite open source projects instead, looking for things to contribute.

I think with usage-based pricing I wouldn't use LLMs quite so freely. It'd probably cure my "addiction" too, but the problem is I'm not sure whether that's a good thing, since this "addiction" has been a somewhat positive force in my life. It's driven me to start new projects and also make major progress on existing ones. It brought me out of a slump. I'm a little afraid of moving away from Claude and not being as driven as I was before.

Meanwhile, as an irregular user of heavy AI, I like the usage-based billing of deepseek. Made a bunch of optimizations to my vibe-coded codebase, created some extra modules, using the chat... has costed me 33 cents so far in a couple weeks.

  • Yeah for a side project I just switched over to DS4 and between Pro and Flash a few days ago I've spent $1.96 both for code work and some large LLM text processing tasks.

    It feels to me as good as the last version of Opus I was using (I think 4.6 or 7?). I'm going direct through the DeepSeek API, not Openrouter.

  • 33 cents? That's insane... I set up an API cost meter on my Claude Code status line and it frequently runs into the hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.

    • My build/work is probably a lot simpler than yours, but still, a huge value for me for just 33 cents.

      Minimum spend/fill is US$2 plus Chinese vat (dunno why but not gonna complain about 6%)

For the 100$ I'm paying for Claude, I'm pretty sure I can use Deepseek way more than I can use Opus via the plan.

The downside are opportunity costs - not using other models to make better decision, I guess, right?