Unfortunately in this case that's not true at all, there was no provider with genuinely close or the same effective prices (mostly based on cache hit cost) to old v4 flash or v4 pro. People have this misconception that other providers must be much cheaper than the official one in case of open weight models.

If you check on OpenRouter, some other providers serve V4 Flash at seemingly cheaper normal input/output tokens rates, but with a huge caveat: they have at least a 5x increase of the cache hit cost of the official API, some have a 10x+. No provider comes close to Deepseek's old low cache prices, and cache is 90%+ of what matters in agentic sessions.

Closest comparison:

- Deepseek: $0.14/$0.28 with $0.0028 cache hit cost for official API

- DeepInfra: $0.08/$0.18 (cheaper base rates!) with $0.016 cache hit (almost 6x!! Deepseek's current cache cost)

Another great example is Kimi K3, official API is $3/$15 and the cheapest provider on OpenRouter is $2.8/$14, only a tiny difference.

The question is if they'll increase prices as well.