> Unless you mean that releasing open weights models is the loss leader, in which case, you might be right but I hope you're wrong.

This is specifically what I meant.

DeepSeek’s official service is trying to recoup some of the training and engineering costs too.

The other providers only have to recoup their hardware costs and the cost of a team to run it.

Even though DeepSeek’s official service is more expensive per token, they’re running at a lower profit than the OpenRouter providers because they had to pay for the R&D.

This is a deliberate choice. We already see it with Qwen splitting their releases between open weight and hosted only models. The open weights are a loss leader to get attention. Without them you’d almost never hear about their hosted models.