There's a bunch of skepticism in the replies but I ran over 100 tasks against DeepSeek 4.1 Flash and Sol (among others) and I can confirm, it is in fact a little smarter than Sol and a little more expensive than Luna. https://slopcop.com/power-ranking?pricing=api

I also spent $280 on DeepSeek doing the tests (direct to DS, not OpenRouter). I suggest that if you can't conceive of anyone spending $200 on DeepSeek, you're not being ambitious enough!

Were you using OpenRouter? I've used 1.8bn tokens in the past week from DeepSeek themselves and 99.2% were cache hits. Total cost was $18.13 usd.

This is my experience, too. It's a great model, but it burns tokens if you use it heavily for work on complex domains.

Edit: others have noted the provider and harness matters. My experience is with opencode.

Same experience. I often see people say how little they spend on DeepSeek v4.1 flash, but when I put 60 bucks into my account, it was gone in a few days of non-exclusive use. I'm actually curious what the difference is. I used it through pi and opencode, but the harness seemed to have no obvious impact on usage.

How on earth you can do 100 dollars in 2-3 days with DeepSeek? I have 7 agents in omp running 24/7 every day. I use maybe 10-15 dollars a day. A rarely see a session going over 2 dollars. My maximum is maybe 3.5 dollars and that session took three days.

What harness you are using?

How have you spent hundreds of dollars? I’ve only spent 11 and I’ve been using it for four months!

same, used a wrapper around cc and i was spending up to $30 a day with basic stuff

What bothers me about this whole AI tokenomics situation is the lack of transparency. OpenAI and Anthropic have to perhaps be the most opaque companies in existence wrt their offerings. There's like a thousand variables that they can change on the backend at the push of a button which can wildly swing API spends within the same model (partly also due to the non-deterministic nature of LxMs, but still), and there's no objective way to measure them other than vibes.

When the regulations do arrive, I think they should really focus on AI companies and API providers being more transparent wrt how they're billing their customers. Because right now, it's a totally vibes-dependent and a mess.

> Subagents are like trading derivatives. You can lose as much as you want.

Excellent pithy warning.

Sadly this is true - for individual folks on the lower end of the spend spectrum.

But there’s a point on that spectrum where the ability to run multiple experiments in parallel, even with a significant amount of (one time) wastage, is overall more cost effective than the alternative.

Afaik there is just pay-as-use with Deepseek

Why use subagents at all

I'm mostly using deepseek 4.1 flash via openrouter, the way I'm doing stuff is:

1. write a sketch of a spec by hand

2. have the llm review the document and question me until it can generate a spec

3. review the spec and revise where needed

4. have it write an implementation plan

5. another round or revision/review

6. executing the plan step by step through the plan, plausing between each step to see if we are still on course and if the decisions it made track with my understanding of what we are doing.

I've been working for a couple of hours tonight, the total cost of the session is €0.6.

it's not the build this thing end to end, but also not quite write function x for me. It is still a lot of manual review, but I find I really need it to even discover what I actually want to build. I just cannot imagine building something in a single shot and getting something that actually has value (unless it is basically a clone of an existing thing). To me the whole value of ai right now is that it's now very cheap to build custom software that exactly matches your preferences.

This was my experience 3 months ago. I had an Android app that interacted with a Bluetooth device that I wanted to reverse engineer and build my own Linux app for it. DeepSeek was struggling really hard. Claude did it end to end after 3 or 4 prompts. To be fair, I was using a web interface for DeepSeek and the CLI for Claude; maybe that makes a large difference.

build this prototype from end-to-end, is this how people build serious software with AI?

Oh buddy you have no idea what a good plan and agent harness can do with deepseek…

I am doing mostly hardware drivers recently, it works fine for complex work.

"build this prototype from end-to-end" works fine with DeekSeek V4.1 Flash, the problem occurs if you're not only building a prototype but want a finished product.

> Deepseek 4 Pro

There's your problem, 4.1 Flash is significantly better and cheaper, to the point where the official DeepSeek API is going to (or already has, I forget) redirect requests for Pro to 4.1 Flash, and adjust billing accordingly too.

4 Pro is still offered by providers I'm sure, since it's open weight, so I can understand making that mistake.

That's an unfortunate experience. Think of v4.1 flash as actually v5.0 flash. It's night and day compared to the 4.0 flash (and 4.0 flash was unintuitively better than 4.0 pro). I would re-evaluate with v4.1 flash. I'm not saying it better than Sol or anything, but it's in the ballpark.

You mean 4.1 Flash which is the first great Deepseek? The one that actually surpasses Opus in my books now.

47 is my crossover for serious things (e.g. Grok 4.7 is below the line and GPT 6 Sol is above the line). I mean, Opus 5.5 is way better, but GPT 6 Sol still gets the job done for anything that doesn't require design thinking.

Although I do think Luna 6 max is ok for some basic things, would never use it for coding myself.

Had the same experience. I got rid of my pro sub of OpenAI. I’m really freaking impressed.

The premium price is only worth fo the hardest problems.

For CRUD shoveling, models like DS4.1 are enough.

And the intelligence gap between cheap and premium is closing, as can be seen from the title of this post.

In the Artificial Analysis index, MiMo 2.6 Pro is smarter than GPT-Sol 6.1 Low at the same cost, and only slightly dumber than Medium. MiMo 2.6 Flash is marginally cheaper and smarter than GPT-Luna 6 Max. (There is no GPT 6+ Terra, which would otherwise be in that range.) These are not negligible or trivial results.

If both DS4.1 and Opus can complete the tasks you throw at it at good enough quality the differences are negligible.

Who cares if your car can go 200mph if all you need is 60. If my requirement is 60mph, I want a faster 0-60, not a higher top speed.

I put 5 dollars at deepseek a long time ago, and somehow it has never been fully spent, can’t imagine anyway to spend 200$ on that thing

Recently, drivers for a bunch of obscure hardware. Lots of c\c++, that i am ok with but not enough to make hardware drivers (i am just impatient). Just using pi agent with a few plugins.

> I've spent $200+ on deepseek and this is for making a multiplayer FPS game.

Why do you expect that $200 will give you that on ANY model? Multiplayer FPS games are very difficult to make, no AI will deliver that today.

I use Claude Code + eternal terminal + tailscale + tmux + some custom skills to get notifications through nfty.sh.

I get the same UX on every platform, works perfectly on very low bandwith environments such as in a cabin, in the subway or in the middle of nowhere.

I tried using other harness such as Pi and opencode but I did not like them. If Claude Code gets weird I can swap in an instant.

You just need to follow this guide and disable artifacts in Claude Code's config: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...

https://omp.sh/ has amazing defaults and it sips tokens. Works really well with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash.

Use the model through a fast and reliable provider such as Fireworks directly, skip OpenRouter.

I have a server living in my home office, always on. I have a tmux session on it with vanilla Codex and Claude Code CLI, I can via my Ubiquiti network stack wiregaurd in to this box anywhere on the globe with just my laptop. Works super well for me. I also have some cheap shelley power plugs that I can use to cycle my PC’s power state if needed.

OpenCode works nicely for me. You can connect it to the DeepSeek platform with an API key.

I use pi.dev, it is pretty minimal, but you can extend it however you want since agent has access to it's own documentation.

I use crush (https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush) with the following patches:

  curl https://tg.st/u/0001-fix-unblock-all-commands-in-bash-tool.patch | git am
  curl https://tg.st/u/0002-feat-add-light-theme-with-auto-detection-for-white-b.patch | git am
  curl https://tg.st/u/0003-feat-enable-yolo-mode-by-default.patch | git am
  curl https://tg.st/u/0004-fix-disable-mouse-grabbing-to-restore-native-termina.patch | git am
  curl https://tg.st/u/0005-feat-skip-project-init-prompt-and-quit-immediately-o.patch | git am
  curl https://tg.st/u/0006-feat-remove-scrambled-rune-animation-from-waiting-sp.patch | git am
  curl https://tg.st/u/0007-feat-remove-quit-banner-and-thank-you-message.patch | git am
  curl https://tg.st/u/0008-feat-show-output-in-full-instead-of-collapsing-trunc.patch | git am
  curl https://tg.st/u/0009-fix-discover-map-model-features-advertised-by-v1-mod.patch | git am
  curl https://tg.st/u/0010-feat-keep-large-and-small-model-selections-in-sync.patch | git am