Mild info dump, since this has a few too many upvotes and some folks might be misunderstanding, 20-30% is assuming a typical agentic workload where input tokens dominate by over 20:1 or at least 10:1, if you are output token heavy then this is going to be a different ball game.

And there is no way in hell anyone can afford caching prices same as what DeepSeek is offering, and DeepSeek keeps the cache available for an insane amount of time most providers will flush it in 5-mins like Claude/Anthropic (some offer customizing it but I am not sure of the pricing, it's load based on some like Fireworks, which means assume a couple minutes at most, they say several minutes god knows what that really means).

There is no way to match DeepSeek's current prices, "profitably" if you are renting a GPU and reselling tokens, unless you have some really amazing caching infra or something.

Deepseek's prices are just insanely cheap, I am not saying it's impossible to get there the overall performance suggests it should be feasible, but I will be damned if any provider could match their tps and caching any time soon at those same prices profitably.

I believe even if Deepseek 2-3x their prices across the board even then they would be cheaper for most long running tasks, that's just how good their caching is.

For one I have managed to hit the cache after over 24 hours on their system it's insane, I honestly didn't care because it was so cheap but it truly made me incredibly happy to think about the engineering that must have taken. TTFT is slightly worse, but it's good enough, for those cache prices I can take a few seconds worth of hit on TTFT.