Xiaomi Mimo v2.5 is my favorite alternative. Matches DS v4 Flash (official) pricing exactly and supports image/audio/video input.

same here. I am using Gemini 2.5 Flash as VSCode "vision proivder" for Deepseek V4 Pro, but it is expensive and not accurate. can't wait for native Deepseek vision.

Have you looked at MiniMax or MiMo? Available today via OpenRouter, and it’ll make the path to porting to DeepSeek a line change https://openrouter.ai/collections/vision-models