Comment by syntaxing
5 hours ago
The cost vs performance is insane for all these new models. I’ve been using Deepseek Flash 1017 and it does whole projects and asks for $0.10 on US provider with ZDR on Openrouter. I convinced a few friends to drop their Claude $20 subscription because DS Flash 1017 brings so much better value. They can still use Opus 5.5 for planning though each call will cost north of $2. Excited to try this model out too once there are US providers.
Opus 5.5 is according to AA cost per task, 23x more expensive than Deepseek with max effort (which is dumb, you shouldn't use) and 13x more expensive on xhigh.
Claude sub has a 60x subsidy, so a $20 sub gives you $1200 in API.
Based on this math, Claude sub is a much better deal than Deepseek. And it's a stronger model of course.
> Claude sub has a 60x subsidy, so a $20 sub gives you $1200 in API.
This is only true if you max out the plan, which requires working around awkward 5-hour and weekly limits. For side projects, sure, you can use a Ralph loop or whatever and just continue when the window resets. For work, I can't afford to simply stop working when I hit my limit. And using Claude at API prices is prohibitively expensive.
Personally, I have a $20/month OpenAI subscription that I supplement with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (currently using CoralBricks as the provider since it's fast and I'm grandfathered into their $0 cache read pricing). It's working out rather well so far. Even when I use DS all day as my primary model, I only pay about $1/day, which is roughly equivalent to what I pay for the sub anyway (but with no limits).
You could also go with mimo-2.6-pro for cheaper and often better results.
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I am sorry, but if you're given $1200 in api for free I wouldn't consider that as working around flakey limits especially when you only need to max out the 5 hour limit 5 times a week.
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I pay API rates via OpenRouter / Fireworks, and I find it challenging to hit the $20 mark.
If I was to do anywhere near that kind of work on Anthropic, I'd find myself running out of tokens, waiting days to continue working, and leaning on their el-crap models to try to avoid running out again. This happens all the time.
This way I get to leverage DS for nearly all my work, benefit from its far superior latencies, and I still get to lean on OpenAPI / Anthropic or whatever SOTA models I want when I need them.
The only time that really falls down is if I'm doing huge amounts of real novel work, which hasn't been the case for a while.
Unfortunately, Fireworks is not keeping up with new models the last few months. When we selected them as a vendor, they were crushing it, new models were available in 1-2 days. Now they want us to "request" them in Discord, instead of making them all available.
I use OpenCode at home, this is one of the reasons.
Their Ember-1 model (Kimi K3 tuned to think less) hallucinates to high hell, I have no trust of it, nowhere to provide feedback, despite their launch post saying they would like feedback. That they loudly and proudly claim their internal devs notice no difference is a huge red flag for me. It says there is too much eyes free coding, I noticed the hallucinations and false claims of task completion immediately.
I don't like the feeling of being watched, which unfortunately rules out the AI subscriptions for me.
For some reason it just creeps me out knowing that someone is recording me and reading my conversations.
isn't that what ZDR is for? (assuming you trust that)
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Isn't a Claude subscription limited to non work / small side projects though? Being regularly rate limited has a major impact on productivity
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He is trying to be faster than his friends, not the bear.
Just because anthropic charges absurd consumer API prices, doesn't mean their subscription is a 'subsidy' lmao.
I'm a heavy Claude/anthropic user, I max out my 20x max plan in 1-2 days at this point. The OpenCode Go $40 plan with DeepSeek flash is like 2x the value of the Claude max 20x plan for how much I actually get out of it, for 1/5 the price.
DeepSeek literally like 10x better value than Claude/Anthropic.
I'm the same way re: bottoming out my 20x Max plan in ~2 days. I'm having better luck lately, though. What helped was using Opus 5.5 for planning and orchestration, and Haiku 5.5 for all of the simple stuff. Claude doesn't default to this -- the default is that it uses the same model for everything -- you have to give it specific instructions.
My math takes that into account. It's 20x more expensive but you get 60x subsidy on subs. I.e you can do more tasks on a $20 claude sub than with $20 in deepseek API.
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Except you get hamstrung by quotas. Which is a pain in the ass, and a massive waste of time.
Lmao this is real anslopic math.
It's just pointing out how heavily subsidized subscriptions are. I often read about how much value people get from DeepSeek, but when I try to use it, I end up spending the amount I'd pay for a subscription much faster.
DeepSeek is really cheap when you compare API pricing, but it's more expensive than a subsidized Anthropic or OpenAI subscription.
I suspect that we may soon be seeing a modern version of VHS vs Betamax. Betamax was better quality, but VHS beat it in virtually every other metric that mattered to most consumers.
(yes, I'm aware the analogy isn't perfect for many reasons)
What harness do you use to drive the models?
Opencode but mainly because I"m used to it from work. I also use Pi and OMP
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