I mean, if you're paying this little, you aren't the customer; the service is either subsidized by investor money (best option), the government (which makes it unfair competition at best) or profit is being realized elsewhere (where?)
There are dozens of providers, the model is just really cheap to run thanks to its clever architecture that optimize the compute and memory usage even in long contexts.
"The thing" isn't free [0]: It is cheap by US/EU income standards.
> who is the customer
If no one else, then definitely those that can only budget $1/mo to $5/mo. Probably 100s of millions, if not billions, of the Global South.
[0] Free access to DeepSeek v4 Flash is indeed available from providers like OpenRouter, OpenCode, and Freebuff (to name a few), but no ZDR.
I mean, if you're paying this little, you aren't the customer; the service is either subsidized by investor money (best option), the government (which makes it unfair competition at best) or profit is being realized elsewhere (where?)
There are dozens of providers, the model is just really cheap to run thanks to its clever architecture that optimize the compute and memory usage even in long contexts.