Your experience with DeepSeek v4 Flash differs from mine: while I usually use DeepSeek v4 Pro (that is also inexpensive), I find using DeepSeek v4 Flash with the Fireworks.ai API and properly configured OpenCode to be very good for routine work, and it is pleasantly very fast. Admittedly I use DeepSeek v4 Pro for difficult problems.

I encourage people to at least once a month to do a quick evaluation with their own problems and workflows. Estimate cost as both what inference tokens cost for a task and also how much human effort it takes to get required results.

I disregard benchmarks.