There's a bunch of skepticism in the replies but I ran over 100 tasks against DeepSeek 4.1 Flash and Sol (among others) and I can confirm, it is in fact a little smarter than Sol and a little more expensive than Luna. https://slopcop.com/power-ranking?pricing=api
replyI also spent $280 on DeepSeek doing the tests (direct to DS, not OpenRouter). I suggest that if you can't conceive of anyone spending $200 on DeepSeek, you're not being ambitious enough!
Is slopcop your domain, because that is awesome. Wishing you great success with it.
replyIt is. TY!
replyWere you using OpenRouter? I've used 1.8bn tokens in the past week from DeepSeek themselves and 99.2% were cache hits. Total cost was $18.13 usd.
replyFor readers wondering, OpenRouter isn’t capable of caching as effectively as DeepSeek is because they will, for instance, switch inference providers in the middle of a session.
replyThe way I use openrouter is I find a model/provider combination I like then pin all requests for that model to that single provider.
replyIf you disable all other providers but DeepSeek in your OpenRouter guardrails, is that effectively the same thing?
replyHow do you do this?
replyprovider: { order: ['deepinfra/turbo'], allowFallbacks: false, },
replyhttps://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/routing/provider-selection
What pests said. And you can make a preset and pass "model": "@preset/deep-seek"
replyFireworks directly. At the time they were the best value of cost, speed, ZDR. They got slower on me though, but I think they are retooling, so maybe things have or will get better again. I think fireworks is primarily for when you want to do your own training on top, which I wasn't doing.
replySame experience. I often see people say how little they spend on DeepSeek v4.1 flash, but when I put 60 bucks into my account, it was gone in a few days of non-exclusive use. I'm actually curious what the difference is. I used it through pi and opencode, but the harness seemed to have no obvious impact on usage.
replyThis is my experience, too. It's a great model, but it burns tokens if you use it heavily for work on complex domains.
replyEdit: others have noted the provider and harness matters. My experience is with opencode.
How have you spent hundreds of dollars? I’ve only spent 11 and I’ve been using it for four months!
replyHow on earth you can do 100 dollars in 2-3 days with DeepSeek? I have 7 agents in omp running 24/7 every day. I use maybe 10-15 dollars a day. A rarely see a session going over 2 dollars. My maximum is maybe 3.5 dollars and that session took three days.
replyWhat harness you are using?
pi. I wasn't even going that hard. I checked the logs for Sep 18 and I did just shy of 3b input with approx 98.5% cache and 5.8m output, which cost around $35. Most of the was a Rust code review exercise with 1 driving agent and a varying number of subagents (up to 6 some times). I do the same with with Sol med/high driving and Luna x-high reviewing and get at least as much done if not more in a day, but I'd use up two x20 weekly allowances for the week. Worth noting that token cost isn't super meaningfull on it's own, because DS is super token heavy (but also great at caching) compared to Sol. (my stats show DS uses 3x the tokens as Sol)
replyThe shape of my work changes obviously, so it'll vary, sometimes more, sometimes less. For example, fixing all of the bugs and defects I found that week was 2-3 times the effort and chewed through my ChatGPT allowance, but I had banked resets...
Also worth noting that codex models have been kind of all over the place recently with their usage... and it looks like costs are changing again.
You might be overusing subagents. Especially with a chatty model like DS, you’ll be wasting millions of tokens on re-discovering the project and facts instead of actual reasoning.
replyWhat are those agents doing? I am out of the loop. Bitcoin mining? Blogging? Reddit bots?
replyI have deepseek agents doing email responses, with real tools (think running quotes, gathering info, scheduling things) and running business processes that used to be done by $35/hr administrative type people. And the capabilities are expanding every day as I learn how to build scaffolding around the model.
reply[delayed]
replyI am a tech lead for a useful but non-essential PaaS my company subscribes to. Their product manager occasionally sends me clearly AI-authored emails. I ignore them. I am a believer in the usefulness of AI, but nothing says I don’t care more clearly than sending me slop.
replyI can’t overstate how bad of an idea I think using an AI for customer interaction is.
Work for my company. Research, code, analysis.
replyI’m lost when I read these sort of comment chains. Free Gemini works just fine for me. Maybe it’s because I don’t use it for programming? How many programmers really exist out there? Surely it can’t support the weight of investment that exists in AI already. It’s just such a small pool of the human race.
reply> How many programmers really exist out there? Surely it can’t support the weight of investment that exists in AI already. It’s just such a small pool of the human race
replyI dont consider myself a programmer but use LLMs almost exclusively for coding.
The number of people able to create useful software today is much much larger than it used to be and arguably a minority of these people are/were "programmers"
First, they come for the programmers, and next the mathematicians. Then it will be the biologists, lawyers and doctors. Humanities will stake it out a little bit longer because AI isn’t human, but AI companies would be dammed if they don’t try. Eventually, with advancements in robotics, stabs at increasingly more physical sciences will also be attempted. Eventually, AI will have its hand in the pie of all knowledge work, if it is possible. Not to mention all the roles like tech support and customer service. Once they have gotten as far as they think they can go, they will try to turn up the prices. However, they might struggle to do so as models are becoming a commodity. This is why they are arguing for regulation and stating that only they can tame these beasts.
replysame, used a wrapper around cc and i was spending up to $30 a day with basic stuff
replyMaybe CC does something that breaks the cache? I cannot recommend Oh My Pi enough. Every default is galaxy brained, and it plays incredibly well with deepseek flash 4.1. My favorite coding harness rn for sure.
replyI found omp used quite a bit more tokens than my fairly basic pi setup... but most of those tokens would be cached with DS V4.1, so maybe worth if there are gains elsewhere.
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