Can you tell me more about deepseek?

I paid $2 for deepseek api, put the key in void editor and made a crypto tool in html.

It turned out to be around 67kb. I used sample files in CSV that were a few hundred lines.

It spent around $1.8 in the hour or two or light coding and follow up bugs.

Is it really really this much?

I can't imagine spending a month using it for a day job, it would cost more than the salary so what gives?

I understand the local ai and all that but do cloud providers cost this much?

Earlier I thought "billion tokens" but now not sure

so Deepseek 4 Pro cannot go on own sessions for too long.

I delegate small-medium tasks: refactors, summaries, research, writing tests + have very good codebase already + extensive history / architecture / docs / linters. so it picks up and does decent small-medium scope work. it is fast, accurate, cheap. does exactly what I want directly and does not waste time nor tokens.

definitely not "implement me complex greenfield project".

My 2 weeks with DeepSeek V4:

Pro is ~50% more expensive than Flash.

Both need babysitting.

Plan, split in small tasks, give it docs, types, tests, linter, best practice examples, etc.

Always start a new session when starting a task.

Do regular manual sanity checks, and tell it to find issues in the codebase.

I pay like $1,50 per day for Pro.

A local AI is not about cost. In fact you will likely pay more for it than with most providers. Just look up the advantages of having access to a technology like this that can be self hosted