It's actually even cheaper when you look at the cache read costs. Those costs can dominate in agent workflows and DeepSeek's cost for cache reads is insanely low comparatively. At $.003626/M tokens, the cheapest other thing on your list is >$.2/M tokens. That's on the scale of 100x cheaper.

And they don't make the model worse once you have a subscription!

It doesn't matter how good Opus is if 2 months into your subscription they make it worse than GPT 3 to save money.

*GLM 5.1