> it usually is good enough for most tasks

The model is fantastic. And costs almost nothing. The only problem I see is that they will train on your data.

There are zero-data-retention providers of DeepSeek models, of which I have used openrouter (with zdr guardrails), and fireworks. But these are 3x to 5x more expensive than directly using DeepSeek, possibly due to poor caching. Thats the price to pay for zdr.

I use these guys. https://crof.ai/tos. Their prices match deepseek, pretty dang fast, and support ZDR. Maybe they serve quantized models but I havent seen a drop in quality from my evals using them vs Deepseek or even for other models.

every cloud provider trains on your data, regardless of what they promise. real user interaction is the best reinforcement-learning trace.