Comment by Scoundreller
1 day ago
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%)