Comment by lifeisloving

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.