alt Hacker NewsDoes DeepSeek offer a heavily subsidized subscription that provides 20x+ more usage than the equivalent value in API tokens?
API usage being profitable is completely plausible, but almost nobody pays API prices for Claude and GPT, nor would they be able to afford them if the subscription suddenly stopped existing.
Replies
trollbridge • today at 1:41 AM
Nope, they don't.
Other providers also charge similar prices (who are obviously not subsidising anything) for running DeepSeek models on their own infrastructure.
OpenCode Go sort of provides a "subscription" which will let you use DeepSeek but they're extremely transparent about what they're offering.
I doubt that's true for enterprise.
In both places I've worked at in the past two years (F500), subscription plans were banned due to data privacy concerns. Everyone _had_ to use the provisioned API tokens (even if they had a personal subscription)