1M cached tokens on deepseek is $0.006, the big labs can't sell anywhere close to this, they have funders expecting returns and huge overhead.
btw I've had a ton of fun with the new deepseek today, I was waiting for my OpenAI 5h limit reset and decided to give it some problems for fun, got pretty great results. Tried some harder problems and still got great results. I don't expect it to be Sol class or anything but I really didn't expect it to be anywhere near this good so we'll see where it ends up. And it's really fun throwing crazy amount of tokens at the wall for ~free instead of watching the subscription limits tick closer while your agents churn away.
Yep. 4.1 Flash is good enough for most routine coding things, but it also makes up for a lot of weakness by being so fast (and cheap of course).
I'm willing to tolerate babysitting things a lot more if I know I'll get almost instant results.
That's 1/3 of GPT 5.6 Luna. It seems rather close to me.
But great that we have a new leader in performance/price in that segment.