In your example, couldn't you parallelize DS's work more ? You could have 11 times as many agents for the same price.

Both DS and GLM had the same numbers of subagents, 5 or so.

But, well, number of subagents doesn't make a difference if model is dumb (GPT 5.4 High, in May,in Chat mode outperformed what I see with DS4.1-F).

That being said, pricing model makes a huge difference for "find at least one" tasks: with API/PAYG if you have a chance to save 90%, you go for it, whereas with subscriptions it is optimal to burn all your remaining allowance right before reset

DS has perf issues if you parallelize it heavily (24+), especially when the context window is above the limit, on a single machine (with custom llm gateway): it fails 4x more often, and is 2x slower than gpt-5.6.