Comment by georgel
2 hours ago
I am curious how you managed to spend that much on Deepseek via OpenRouter. I loaded $100 back in July while using v4-flash or whatever the cheap good model was at the time, and have upgraded as the new ones came out from Deepseek. I still have $16 and some of that spend also goes towards the AI usage from my customers (the context they need to load in is quite large too).
And I am using the Claude Code harness with DS as the endpoint. And I use it ~5-8hrs a day to do my coding.
It's wild how different usage patterns are between users.
I have seen the Cursor leaderboard on my company and the vibe coders consume about 5x more tokens than the developers. They and other office workers also have Claude and their limits are often over around Wednesday.
People are using millions of tokens to do very simple HTML reports. I have seen someone asking the LLM to download the entire data into the context and asking it to sort.
Those usage patterns don't correlate to output.
Likely the user doesn't know what they're doing or has extermely bad workflows. They're prob not managing their cache, and dont use compaction.. Letting context get to 500k and invalidating their cache every 10 tool calls because they have no providor fallback settings.
I was running deepseek v4.1 pretty much non stop during work hours, with heavy tool/mcp usage and finding it very difficult to spend more than $75 in a month.
Also the cheapest providers on Openroutrr can often have terrible cache hit %, short TTLs resulting in their effective price being much more expensive than people realize. 75% cache pretty much destroys any savings from a super cheap token perspective.