Claude sub has a 60x subsidy, so a $20 sub gives you $1200 in API.
Based on this math, Claude sub is a much better deal than Deepseek. And it's a stronger model of course.
This is only true if you max out the plan, which requires working around awkward 5-hour and weekly limits. For side projects, sure, you can use a Ralph loop or whatever and just continue when the window resets. For work, I can't afford to simply stop working when I hit my limit. And using Claude at API prices is prohibitively expensive.
Personally, I have a $20/month OpenAI subscription that I supplement with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (currently using CoralBricks as the provider since it's fast and I'm grandfathered into their $0 cache read pricing). It's working out rather well so far. Even when I use DS all day as my primary model, I only pay about $1/day, which is roughly equivalent to what I pay for the sub anyway (but with no limits).
For some reason it just creeps me out knowing that someone is recording me and reading my conversations.
ZDR is:
1. A pinky-promise you have no way of verifying
2. A contract term, which means its still subject to the good-old "lawful request or court order" clauses
3. Subject to arbitrary provider exceptions ... see Anthropic and Fable
See Tinfoil (US)[1] or Privatemode (Germany)[2].
However the way it is going, there will not even be private APIs, just recording and watching all the time.
Anthropic is unsurprisingly leading the race to the bottom of the barrel by requiring moderator reviews for API customers. Apparently everyone at GCP and AWS complied.
GCP has just followed and done the same thing on Gemini Argon. No CMEK allowed. Azure has some ZDR but presumably they are restricting it.
Some neoclouds are still standing but some are also regressing by using server-side scanning to prompt human review.
There are two/three private TEE providers. One of them (Tinfoil) just put server-side scanning inside the enclave for the consumer product. The API is good for now, I am taking it as notice from them to get off the service before they start logging everything.
If I was to do anywhere near that kind of work on Anthropic, I'd find myself running out of tokens, waiting days to continue working, and leaning on their el-crap models to try to avoid running out again. This happens all the time.
This way I get to leverage DS for nearly all my work, benefit from its far superior latencies, and I still get to lean on OpenAPI / Anthropic or whatever SOTA models I want when I need them.
The only time that really falls down is if I'm doing huge amounts of real novel work, which hasn't been the case for a while.
I use OpenCode at home, this is one of the reasons.
Their Ember-1 model (Kimi K3 tuned to think less) hallucinates to high hell, I have no trust of it, nowhere to provide feedback, despite their launch post saying they would like feedback. That they loudly and proudly claim their internal devs notice no difference is a huge red flag for me. It says there is too much eyes free coding, I noticed the hallucinations and false claims of task completion immediately.
I'm a heavy Claude/anthropic user, I max out my 20x max plan in 1-2 days at this point. The OpenCode Go $40 plan with DeepSeek flash is like 2x the value of the Claude max 20x plan for how much I actually get out of it, for 1/5 the price.
DeepSeek literally like 10x better value than Claude/Anthropic.
DeepSeek is really cheap when you compare API pricing, but it's more expensive than a subsidized Anthropic or OpenAI subscription.
(yes, I'm aware the analogy isn't perfect for many reasons)