I've been using it extensively since the release and the best summary I can give is that it's good enough to use it for (almost) everything and cheap enough that the cost are irrelevant. I'm running it in Oh My Pi with a second instance running as "advisor" and even with 5-6 active sessions (effectively 12 streams) I'm struggling to spend more than 5 bucks per day.
OpenCode Go even has double limits temporarily so for 10 USD you effectively get 140 USD of tokens to spend. It would impress me if someone could burn that amount with "normal" usage. Even when running multiple sessions.
I have a Claude Max subscription but I've barely touched it, it just feels like a step back to have to think about limits and usage even though the models are stronger.
The beauty of intelligence at this cost (even if it's not SOTA) is that it opens a whole bunch of new use cases. Test failure in CI? Have the bot automatically propose a fix, its cheap enough that you can discard it w/h issues. Test coverage too low? Auto generate tests on CI for every pull-requests! Monitoring server logs, continuous security audits and investigating every received exception now becomes possible.
I'm thinking about having it automatically filter and re-rank my social media feeds so I can steer the algorithm instead of the other way around.
Perhaps other people (with enormous budgets) were already doing all of the above but for us this is a really exciting release!
Kimi K3 was an interesting model only a month ago, and now we're looking at the same performance for 1/20th of the price. Wild how fast this is advancing.
Yeah either the benchmark isn't very useful anymore or V4 Flash is a really, really good model.
In my use, DeepSeek v4 Flash (which replaced the quite excellent MiniMax M3) lags behind GLM 5.2 & Muse Spark 1.2 (let alone Kimi K3). Also, K3 is a much bigger multi-modal model, while Flash is text-only and likely optimised for coding tasks.
And now nobody seems interested in it because the price hasn't gone down
it's still $3/$15 for all providers on openrouter
because of some Kimi license
Last weeks's discussion (591 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49120299
I’ve been refreshing hacker news constantly for a week now waiting for v4 pro, after they stated it would follow «soon». I have learnt «soon» is a matter of definition.
This reminds me of those pareto-style speedrun record charts when a new glitch is discovered.
[0] https://taylor.town/silver-landmines
When I see dramatic leaps like this, it tells me that the important hacks haven't yet been discovered.
It's always fun when Max reasoning is cheaper than High reasoning.
results comparable to gpt 5.6 luna but cheaper
promising!
Since the x-axis is log-scaled, DeepSeek is much cheaper than visually implied (mousing over the raw values, it's 1/4th the cost of Luna).
Is this pricing from Deepseek with training on usage?
Per the announcement tweet, BaseTen was the inference provider which has 20% cache cost that is typical: https://www.baseten.co/library/deepseek-v4-flash-0731/
Is it still cheaper than Luna if using an OpenAI subscription? My gut is no, but I have not done the math.
Everything is cheaper if using a subscription, but some applications require API usage.
Why wasn’t this run against ARC-AGI-3? Or did it fail to solve anything?
Price is confounded by VC subsidies, economies of scale, and inference optimizations. I think a more interesting chart would be ARC AGI vs forwards pass flops or ARC AGI vs training tokens. Of course we don't have those numbers for the closed source models or even some of the open weight ones.
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is an open-weights model which means price is determined by competition/invisible hand of the marketplace: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731
With the exception of cache costs, all providers have similar input/output costs.
Not counting the cost of making the model, which is subsidized by… someone? The chinese gov i think?
right, but who cares? that's not an ongoing subsidy that is going to expire and leave us all paying a higher price for this model, this model already exists, we can use it, and we can expect to continue using it for the forseeable future.
the subsidy concern is that the subsidizer stops paying and then we all have to pay more for our usage.
weak argument. deepseek v4 flash is open weight, you can easily find other providers with competitive price with Deepseek (except for input caching), some even half as cheap.
It is wild that this a log scale of cost to me!
This latest DeepSeek is almost at the "too cheap to meter" level. That's going to be a larger unlock than models like Fable/Mythos that are way too expensive to justify, IMO.
What secret sauce do they have?
It's serviceable but, like many Chinese models, it uses a lot of tokens to get work done.
Price is not a good meter. Active parameters per token are. Joule would be even better.
Price accounts for computational/architectural efficiency improvements whereas active parameters does not.
They did recently announce they're increasing prices though (got a mail yesterday I think), so not sure this analysis showing it as price outlier will last
That is only when using the DeepSeek API directly. OpenRouter has 24 different providers serving it at existing prices.
But DeepSeek now has a warning they’re going to sharply increase their API pricing sometime in the future.
Dax (from Opencode) has tweeted that they can replicate or beat the price with rented GPUs. Deepseeks secret sauce is the incredibly cheap caching (magnitude cheaper than other providers).
vLLM has recently released a similar approach. It's not as effective as what DeepSeek does but still an interesting development.
I have no doubt that in due time other providers will match or perhaps even beat the current DeepSeek prices.
Eh, what are you guys even talking about? Deepseek is not cheapest provider as is, and it's MIT. So deepseek making it more expensive to use is just nonsense, they can only change their own pricing. It's the beauty of MIT license and open weights. If anything, these models are some of the safest in the world to use if you worry about a rug pull.
90%+ cache hit rate is common, and so you'll see on places like openrouter that Deepseek cache cost is indeed a magnitude cheaper than the rest.
any link to this caching tech?
Yes, there is warning, but also there are many providers on OpenRouter[0], hosting open weight model with similar pricing. The question is Will they go up as well?
[0] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...
Source?
If you're on the DeepSeek Platform, you'd see this:
"We plan to raise the overall pricing for DeepSeek API services in the near future, with a significant increase expected. Please plan your usage accordingly. The specific pricing plan will be subject to official notice."
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1vgpysh/deepseek_...
>even if it's not SOTA
And, probably 99.99% of people using LLM probably don't even need SOTA anyway.
Deepseek v4 flash will go down as one of the most important models ever released.
It's just insanely good for the price.