Is Deepseek just eating cost or are people able to host their open models for comparable costs?
replyIf openrouter is to be trusted, the cheapest offers that are not from Deepseek itself are:
reply- twice as expensive on the output (1.52 vs 0.87)
- six times as expensive on the input (0.33 vs 0.05)
https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro?sort=price#pr...
Other people are hosting it in the same order of magnitude. Xioami recently matched DeepSeek’s pricing.
replyThese things enormously benefit from economies of scale. I am fairly certain their margins might be low but they don't actually sell API at loss, however that doesn't mean your cost footprint would be anywhere as low.
replyThey focused on caching and other optimizations.
replyLikely CCP-subsidized
replyDeepSeek v4 Pro is not actually that good a model compared to GLM 5.1 and Kimi K2.6. It's an okay coder/thinker for the price.
replyHow so? In my experience trying these models using opencode Go, DeepSeek is superior to GLM 5.1.
replyIf anything, DS4 has 1 million context window, while GLM 5.1 has 200K.
There are also benchmarks comparing the two: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/deepseek-v4...