Comment by Tharre
2 hours ago
How could that possibly work? Deepseek was undercutting every other provider by an order of magnitude on cached tokens.
Do they just set a super low caching time and hope that drops effective cache rates low enough? Do all other providers somehow overcharge by that much? Are they just going to sell it as a loss leader?
> Do all other providers somehow overcharge by that much?
This, I think. Cached inputs have an opportunity cost (keeping the KV cache until use) but a hit is basically free. “Basically” - if the cache is offloaded to system RAM or NVMe there’s some scheduling overhead.
From a consumer viewpoint a more interesting metric than the raw costs is
from a personal standpoint rather than a per-provider one (e.g. if OpenRouter is blindly dispatching your requests you might have a bad time).
> if OpenRouter is blindly dispatching your requests
This can somewhat be the case, depending on your config. I updated mine to make DeepSeek high priority because I was having a lot of cache misses and reliability issues with the default (cheapest (at face value)) providers, and cost was actually higher overall than anticipated. Was smooth sailing from then; might have to tweak things again now pricing has changed though.
I was having the same issue. Did not find any provider that had a cache hit rate anywhere close to DeepSeeks own API.
Not sure if this was an OpenRouter issue or with the other inference providers.
System RAM and/or NVMe storage still has a real cost. And swapping out the context between VRAM and system RAM / NVMe still consumes bandwidth.
I don't have a clue on what the real cost to inference providers comes out to, but it seems really weird that there would be such a big gap, in what should be a pretty competitive market.