alt Hacker NewsThe reason people aren’t freaking out is because most people are using heavily subsidized subscriptions.
I tried the cheapest provider on openrouter and burned through $50 in a few days. Quality was ok, seems slightly above Luna quality perhaps? But that $50 is 1/4 of my codex subscription where I could have burned that many tokens or more using Astra within my weekly reset.
This won’t last forever but as long as the frontier labs are subsidizing this heavily the open models won’t matter.
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But aren't you developing bad habits and learning patterns that won't work long term? Or do you think things will get cheap enough that you will be able to keep going with your current patterns post-subsidies?
I am curious how you managed to spend that much on Deepseek via OpenRouter. I loaded $100 back in July while using v4-flash or whatever the cheap good model was at the time, and have upgraded as the new ones came out from Deepseek. I still have $16 and some of that spend also goes towards the AI usage from my customers (the context they need to load in is quite large too).
And I am using the Claude Code harness with DS as the endpoint. And I use it ~5-8hrs a day to do my coding.
How's the caching? I have 99.5% cache hit rate with deepseek when using their own API, it's dirt cheap.
OpenRouter is complete garbage.
Buy directly from DeepSeek's API.
You can literally get overcharged 100x on DeepSeek on OpenRouter (or more).
Which provider was that?
You should basically never pay API prices, they are always several times higher than subscriptions.
There are several open weight subscription providers. OpenCode Go used to be good but now it's complete shit. Charm Hyper is really great and the best value. Other subscriptions have a more limited model selection or provide less value but are still decent.
Also DeepSeek usage is subsidized as well, it’s a power hungry model.
Yes. You have to find the provider with pricing that suits your usage.
I am having 98% my input in cache, so using Coralbricks makes sense due to them giving cache reads for free — you only pay for writes. I spend maybe 5-10 dollars a day and my agents basically work day and night implementing things for me.
If your tasks are write-heavy, find a provider with cheaper output.
If you build a customer-facing app, pay a bit extra for 400+ tok/s e.g. on Lithos.