> The DeepSeek provider on OpenRouter is only the 5th-cheapest for V4 Flash

You might have the default settings on your account, which limit Deepseek as a provider. If you disable that feature you see them on openrouter as well (and they serve it at the same cost as their own API).

I just checked my settings and I have everything enabled. https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash?sort=price (per-1M price) shows DeepSeek provider as #5. https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash/pricing?sor... (effective price) shows them as #3. The effective price will change your total cost since each provider has a different price for input vs output vs cache, so what's #1 and #5 for one person could be #5 and #1 for somebody else, depending on their workload.

However, I just double checked, and OpenRouter's pricing page for Flash v4 with DeepSeek provider shows a cache hit rate of $0.0028, which is the same as on DeepSeek's official API pricing page ($0.0028), so they do seem to be the same price, (assuming DeepSeek is able to pin your specific OpenRouter requests to the same DeepSeek server). OpenRouter adds 5% to that cost, but still it might be cheaper than the other providers.

Also just found out OpenRouter has a new feature "Response Caching" where they can cache identical requests and return them immediately with no billing. The entire request must be identical, though, not just a prefix, and you have to enable this feature. I don't know who would need to send multiple identical requests, but it's better than nothing?