I would bet that Deepseek API pricing is still more cost effective per token than the subscriptions. With the increase in quality Deepseek Flash just got (in my personal testing so far, it seems to have improved a lot at following instructions, and has become more proactive), there really isn’t anything that can match it in terms of cost effectiveness.

The issue for me is the data privacy if you're using their hosted prices, because you cannot opt out of data collection (and I'm not sure how you'd legally follow up on it if they did offer it, but didn't actually follow through). That means all of my code is being retained for training.

I've used it in some open source code though, and loved how fast it was.

My mind is changing on how valuable my code actually is though... it's the complete picture, how it's put together, the design, the UI, the attention to detail that's the real value.

I'm not a heavy user of agentic coding, but still use them quite a bit for some automation here and there. I've been going around shopping all the ~$10 subscriptions and I finally settled on openrouter + ds4 pro. The more intensive days cost me $1 and I set a $2 weekly limit which I've never hit the past 3 weeks, to me it's way cheaper than most subscriptions and I don't have to worry about maximizing my weekly quota/resets.