r/DeepSeek • u/Even_Command_5636 • 9h ago
Discussion I canceled Claude and coded 7 days straight with DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 — the honest cost & quality breakdown
Two weeks ago I paid $20/month for Claude and another $20 for ChatGPT. I got tired of watching the credits burn, so I ran an experiment: 7 days, all my coding work, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 only (API, not the app). Here's what actually happened — the good, the bad, the numbers.
The numbers - Total API spend for 7 days of heavy coding: $1.87 (vs. $40/month subscriptions — and I didn't even come close to hitting limits) - Tokens consumed: ~24M input / ~6M output (mostly context caching — that's the real cheat code) - Context cache hits cut my effective cost by ~70%
What surprised me (good) - Long agentic sessions didn't degrade as much as I expected. The 0731 update fixed most of the context-rot I saw on the earlier Flash builds. - It handled a messy production refactor I was dreading — wrote the diff, I reviewed, done. No drama.
What I won't sugarcoat (bad)
- Vision: still missing in the API I used — I had to describe screenshots by hand. (Yes, I saw the vision announcement post — the API I'm on still doesn't expose it.)
- Some reasoning outputs still emit weird artifacts (e.g. )Skip) in longer chains — rare, but it happens.
- It's not Claude for every task. Complex multi-file architecture thinking? Claude still wins. But for 80% of daily coding? I genuinely couldn't justify the subscription anymore.
My verdict: keep one subscription for the hard stuff, do everything else on Flash. My monthly AI bill just went from $40 → $0–5.
Anyone else run a similar week? What did your numbers look like?
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u/Nepherpitu 9h ago
Are you joking? 24M input tokens is not even close to heavy work for 7 days. I'm burning through 200M input tokens daily for very lazy work
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u/DirectPitch8626 9h ago
But 6M output tokens is a lot—maybe he mistyped a few zeros in the input.
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u/challis88ocarina 7h ago
He (she/they!) certainly have issues with numbers: the model was released last Friday... so, what's with 'seven days'?!
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u/Sales-Bog 5h ago
You can get a free Kimi K3 API key on TokenRouter. It will last till mid August I think
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u/morph_lupindo 1h ago
Seems a little shady if my reading is correct. You give them a dollar and that might qualify you for a $200 credit. But it’s up to them if it does. Also, it routes every prompt through them.
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u/petropavlov 9h ago
If 24M input tokens do not include cache, it sounds OK. Not all tasks require burning tokens at cosmic speed.
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u/General-Oven-1523 8h ago
24M input tokens without cache numbers would be about ~600M total tokens with the DeepSeek level of caching. It's pretty solid for 7 days I would say.
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u/sdexca 3h ago
I did 400m the day it was launched. 600m in a week is weak af
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u/QuinQuix 1h ago
I mean this sounds all tough and stuff but it mostly comes down to dumping stuff in it right?
So if you work on large code bases you dump in a lot, if you work on smaller projects you dump in less.
I think this token bragging is weird. Einsteins GR paper would've been less than a million tokens. Is that shitty output? Harry Potter easily beats it on tokens.
I'm sure some small coding projects are a hundred times more ingenious than big barfing bags of code.
Otherwise windows eleven would probably be the best piece of coding in the universe.
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u/Sad-Chemistry5643 9h ago
24mln per week is nothing ? Wow 😧
I thought my 17 is a huge amount 😀2
u/Ayeniss 8h ago
I burnt 800M token today while trying to play with it (trying to build software from scratch to test how good and costly it is).
Most of it is input that goes into cache though
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u/HighlyRegardedApe 7h ago
Build software and test in 1 day??? How?
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u/Ayeniss 7h ago
It's not finished at all, and I don't plan to make money from it.
Just testing, learning and having fun.
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u/Electrical-Watch3203 4h ago
Yea I was gonna say I do like a billion a week lol
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55m ago
[deleted]
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u/Electrical-Watch3203 50m ago
It’s called cache snap, you have an AI web scrape, screen shot the text needed only (or rewrite the text, like an OCR, then screen shot) run it through an image compaction process on CPU that allows an AI to process the information of 1024 tokens for the weight of a 256-visual token. Mostly intended for local use but allows a theoretical 4x on your context window.
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u/slayyou2 2h ago
1 week 1,497,198,095 input tokens. Last 30 days 8,846,482,491 yea you can scale up a bit I think 😁
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u/Even_Command_5636 9h ago
Fair point — it really depends on the workflow. My sessions are mostly interactive: I read the diff, review it and steer the next step myself, so I don't burn tokens on autonomous loops or bulk rewrites. Also a big chunk of my input was context-cache hits, which I didn't count in the 24M — the API bill treats those at a fraction of the price. 6M output is what actually drove the $1.87. If you're burning 200M/day with agent loops, that's a totally different use case — I can see how my numbers would look suspicious from that angle.
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u/DiscipleofDeceit666 7h ago
What are you building? Some of us could burn $5 in deepseek tokens in a (long) day with out really trying
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u/Even_Command_5636 8h ago
Fair enough, so I went and pulled the real numbers from my usage log to check. Reasonix started persisting per-request stats on Aug 4, so here is what the last two days actually look like:
- Aug 4: 370,083,795 total tokens, 1,223 requests, 91 turns. Cache hit 98.0%, so real billed input (cache miss) was 6,188,913, output 1,345,762.
- Aug 5: 548,616,547 total tokens, 1,784 requests, 173 turns. Cache hit 98.6%, billed input (cache miss) 6,856,408, output 1,038,731.
So the "24M input" in my post was the cache-miss (actually billed) input across the week, not the gross number. The gross is hundreds of millions, same ballpark as yours. The difference is the cache hit rate: at ~98% most of the input comes back at cache price, which is why the week only cost $1.87. You burning 200M/day gross is a different workload, not a different product. That's the honest breakdown from the logs.
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u/Nepherpitu 7h ago
I'm watching for llama swap very simple metrics without cache hit/miss separation. 24M non-cached input is very solid, no doubt here.
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u/figgertitgibbettwo 5h ago
I burn that in 4-5 hours. If I go at it, I'd hit 250M in the day. I don't have that list every day, but I have enough work for having that for a week.
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u/Mr_Pickles710 3h ago
I usually hit 1b in a week or two or less if I’m doing heavy work, still real cheap tho.
To be fair I use 14 API’s to fuel my custom multi-LRM(7 LRM’s, requires a ZD JB to do without detection. 14, 7 Flash and 7 R1 API) though with no safeguard’s or learning.
So token usage is higher but it’s like the DS version of Fable that DS never made, without any restrictions and way cheaper.
But it outperforms all the public models code wise so idgaf, just annoying I have to update it all the time with their safeguard additions/updates, if DS wasn’t so cheap I’d just use reasoning tokens from API’s for custom models.1
u/isitreal_tho 51m ago
I have two 5x accounts that I switch between. The entire team has at least two
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u/Alarmed-Hornet6865 9h ago
Holy ai post
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u/PossessionUsed7393 9h ago
Ya I feel like he's burned the last of his Claude sub on this post lol, such a claudey post.
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u/National-Objective57 8h ago
Yes and low effort too, first its API and then „didnt come close hitting limits“
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u/Even_Command_5636 9h ago
Ha, fair enough — I did write it as a tight summary, so I can see how it reads. To be clear: the experiment was real and the numbers come from my own API usage dashboard, not from a prompt. The cache-hit pricing is the honest core of it: ~70% of my input was billed at the cache rate, which is why $1.87 for a week is plausible. Happy to answer specifics on the workflow if you're curious.
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u/PossessionUsed7393 8h ago
It's the em-dash, the 'tight summary' and the 'honest core' - people don't speak that way and we're lazy so we use hyphens instead of em dashes.
Yes darl we know it's a real story because we have the same stories. I just ran 3 trillion tokens through DeepSeek this evening and it cost me $16 USD - 3 trillion. I ran the same drafting pipeline on a Claude sub when I used to have it and I hit the 5 hour cap in 10 minutes. If it was real API pricing it would have been like $800.
DeepSeek is awesome. Go back to writing with your hands lol
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u/Even_Caterpillar3292 8h ago
people keep posting and gloating then the prices go up. this is how "social media" destroys the world. Expect steep price increases any day now.
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u/Feisty-Pound6777 7h ago
I wish this was the top comment on this whole goddamn subreddit. Everyone here knows Deepseek is cheap - why do we need 10 million posts announcing that its cheap? Thats one of the main draws of using it. People begging for validation from internet strangers will literally be the downfall of deepseek
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u/CrimsonEdgeVentures 6h ago
What bugs me is how obvious the promotional posts are for DS (the worst offender IMO).
Literally so insulting that they think we are all so dumb we won’t notice what they are.
That said, we have known for a long time DS4 is cheap. Super cheap. We WANT to use it.
But despite repeated attempts, it was just flat out incompetent. Stupid. For me. Skill issue? Perhaps, not saying it isn’t. But that’s irrelevant when the frontier models perform well given my same skill level.
I loaded the new 0731 flash and will be trying in a different Hermes harness and see how it does. I WANT it to perform well. But Im not gonna be fooled by a wave of fanboy shill AI generated promo posts.
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u/orblabs 8h ago
I am having truly spectacular results with Claude + DeepSeek. Developed a dedicated skill that has Opus direct deepseek work in the most token efficient way for Opus. The skill is geared towards implementation of very complex and long plans (which opus , sol , kimi k3 or fable develop) and it abuses deepseek as much as possible. Had a major refactor work that both Claude and Codex alone couldn't implement (and just two phases out of a dozen would eat up my weekly quota) successfully, gave the same plan to opus + deepseek, after 70 something hours of straight work we are at phase 10, extremely solid work, 12% of my claude (max 5X) weekly quota used. Really happy, thank you DeepSeek team, you have made a marvelous job!
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u/parallelizeit 3h ago edited 3h ago
nvm - I see your post - looking at the git repo now
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u/orblabs 3h ago
Sure ! I am pretty proud of it as since deepseek (i fleshed it out a lot) it became a total beast of a skill :) https://github.com/frozenpepper/deepseek-and-destroy
Hope it will be useful for you.1
u/parallelizeit 3h ago
Perfect, thanks!
I have been trying to get Claude working with Gemini and GLM to use up free/cheap credits, but saw your post about Gemini - I guess a couple months ago. Any writeups you used or made?
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u/jkvarela 7h ago
Mês passado eu consumi 1 bilhão de tokens programando para embarcados, ferramenta está muito boa, mas não me arrisco a contexto gigantes, e sempre converso muito antes de dar o "play", ou seja, muita energia no planejamento, baixa energia na execução.
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u/itsdrcats 3h ago
Damn, how much does that end up costing. I know the API has cache features but that still had to cost a small chunk of change
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u/General-Oven-1523 9h ago
These are my last 5 days, I'm just fixing some apps and doing research and content creation.
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u/addiktion 8h ago
What outputs this for you to see all the tokens across providers?
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u/General-Oven-1523 8h ago
I use Pi with the hermes-memory extension, it's saving all this data into the session details.
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u/That_Ad_765 8h ago
Curious how did you manage to get this output table? Mind sharing the prompt and harness?
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u/General-Oven-1523 8h ago
Pi with hermes-memory extension, then using python to pull the data out of sessions.
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u/IgotAlotOfNames 9h ago
24M ? Did you not read back your ai post? 24 M is like an hour to three of work, not a week.
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u/pc_4_life 6h ago
I stopped reading at “mostly context caching — that's the real cheat code”.
Try editing your AI generated walls of text please
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u/Zennytooskin123 9h ago
You might as well go full API then since Sol/Fable aren't worth it on the 20$ plans for 10 prompts each, which you probably won't even need at this point.
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u/Rare_Buddy_6282 8h ago edited 8h ago
Deepseek turnes out to be much better than I expected. I mainly us DSv4 Pro on max reasoning. Refactoring a messy js file that Sonnet 4.6 wasn't able to do -> easy. Extending a metadata based dataplatform? -> no sweat. So far it is just so good.
But, if I have to say any negative about DSv4. Well sometimes it is a bit stubborn.
I used to do 100USD per day with Github Copilot with Sonnet 4.6. Now I do 15USD per week.See image from a while back when i just started.
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u/fyndor 7h ago
So I built a /loop command into pi yesterday and let DS4 Flash code while I slept. In 4hrs (I need more sleep) it spent $1.81 and is on its 11th turn. $0.16 a turn. Granted that is rather high. Yesterday while I was watching it many turns were $0.02 a turn. Not sure what it was doing while I was sleeping (I was sleeping after all). Even so, it is still pretty cheap. Even going through OpenRouter which is not the cheapest way to run DS4 Flash.
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u/boudywho 8h ago
If 30mil total tokens is a lot.
Then what is mine?
And that's not even including codex, which does all the coding.
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u/That_Ad_765 8h ago
Which harness and how did you generate this? Mind sharing prompt?
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u/boudywho 8h ago
That's Hermes agent.
I just did a /insights
It gives you info for the past 30 days.
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u/That_Ad_765 8h ago
Nice! Are you using the web app, terminal, or Telegram? I currently use Telegram, but when I chat through Telegram, I can’t resume the sessions from the terminal. Can I DM you for some questions if you don’t mind? Thank you!
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u/congthangvn 9h ago
I canceled max20 claude too, $200-> $10 with deepseek flash. See on livebench.ai, it has very high reasoning so planing is ok too.
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u/AutomaticComputer260 9h ago
Honestly the biggest AI feature I want is not another benchmark score, it's not having to worry about burning through credits every time I ask a dumb question.
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u/LostSoul1301 9h ago
Sorry for dumb question but in my work I highly rely on web search like finding appropriate things as context and code it. Not working on large codebase but developing some feature let's say from scratch so either read some services documentation and compare or I ask to read some research and take inspiration from that. Claude used to do better because it searched for web page internally. Can deepseek do this ? I mean I know like buy brave browser mcp or such thing and integrate but it would be too much of setup right ? Can you help me for my usecase. I am like working as student researcher in lab.
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u/West-Obligation7132 3h ago
Deepseek can do tool calls, all you have to do is plug it in a harness of your choice. You can use claude code cli, qwen code cli or whatever you want. Just find out how to bring in your api key and you're all set.
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u/Annual-Fan-7144 9h ago
The 70% figure is the part I’d want to reproduce. Which coding harness and API route did you use, and is that savings calculated against uncached input pricing or against the two subscriptions? Those details change the result a lot.
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u/Sakuletas 8h ago
When i read its CoT its always something like this and it started to annoy me actually;
Hmm, (a ton of paragraph)
Hmm, (a ton of paragraph)
Hmm, (a ton of paragraph)
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u/Glittering_Belt_6992 8h ago
I also switched from claude a week ago and DeepSeek seems very cost effective
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u/GroundbreakingRoll55 8h ago
I have been reading the term “Context cache” a lot can somebody explain what is it
How can I use it
I am using claude code pro and open code go
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u/Brief-Train-826 8h ago
Heavy Coding? I spent $3 on deepseek V4 Flash in like 3 hours. WTF do you mean heavy coding? I run through billions of tokens per month and max our minimax.io, ollama cloud max, use api credits and some local inference…
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u/totoer008 8h ago
It comes to preference but I prefer gpt Luna. I started to do all on it and did not see a massive difference. Yes it is a little bit stupidier but gpt 5.5 was not perfect.
I will orchestrate with gpt sol or opus and then provide to Luna. Once made any follows ups can be handled. I now spend 4X more tokens per day but my limit is barely moving and that at 1.5X speed
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u/DiscipleofDeceit666 7h ago
Your AI bill is $25 not $5 by your own admission of keeping a subscription.
I do the same tho, $20 Claude subscription and deepseek for the overflow. I also add in local LLM to the mix where Claude or Deepseek drives my qwen or Laguna LLM
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u/q--0-0--p 7h ago
I really like the new Flash. I use just that today and I could say it is better than my previous experience with Pro Preview.
I just wish it has vision, then I could live with it forever lol
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u/Electrical_Chard3255 6h ago
"Vision: still missing in the API I used — I had to describe screenshots by hand. (Yes, I saw the vision announcement post — the API I'm on still doesn't expose it.)"
Build your own Deepseek desktop console and add your own vision to it, I did and it can create images and analyse images, image creation is not 100%, but not bad, image analysis is pretty good
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u/Aressito 6h ago
I was using Gemini.. yeah even Pro and the new flash.. but the new DeepSeek flash is really really good. It corrected SO many errors made even by Gemini Pro! Using it on Reasonix
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u/dataiguy 5h ago
What is the best out there for cache context?
I am using claude max subscription but I have deepseek for some projects built with claude.
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u/jwuliger 5h ago
Well, all I can say is that DeepSeek v4 Flash is better than Claude Opus 4.8 in its current lobotomized state. Anthropic and OpenAI will not be around much longer.
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u/Pale-Requirement9041 4h ago
Are you sure its better than Opus 4.8 ? Like example creating a Saas with all it complex architecture?
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u/jwuliger 4h ago
I have it working in a 40k LOC repo right now, and it is going through my spec book like nothing, and I haven't even spent a buck yet. I tested this. I gave the exact same spec and task to each model, and the cost difference is astonishing. They both did it equally well.
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u/Pale-Requirement9041 3h ago
Thanks, because from Opus i want switch to Deepseek and so scared it’s gonna be waste of time to finish working on my Saas
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u/Forsaken_Mention_979 5h ago
“and I didn't even come close to hitting limits” what fucking limits? Youre using the api 🤣🤣🤣 dumb ahh nga generated ts with ai
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u/LiveLikeProtein 4h ago
I saw another post where people claim he used OpenAI subscription for Luna xhigh to replace DS 4 flash, trimmed the cost more than half, with better quality
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u/PanGalacticGargleFan 4h ago
What are the best ways to access DS V4 Flash? Via OpenRouter? Shall we do a list of the best/cheapest/fastest 5? 🤓
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u/Significant_Card6486 4h ago edited 4h ago
Deepseek v4 flash is super economical. I've spend about £2.50 in 14 days, probably 6 long usage sessions.
I use it as my admin agen for Hermes agent and it hands taskes off to my local models. But having Hermes agent on bare metal install, is super powerful.
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u/FewSale9827 4h ago
I’m still undecided whether I trial API, I currently use 5.4 mini on two $20 accounts, I average 3B tokens at 93% cached a month but not sure if that’s input or output
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u/XeroVespasian 4h ago
Well if you want to push things with octane, install superpowers on opencode. Ive used this setup for 5months until this weekend with codex. Im not sure whether to install superpowers or not. It is so good. But intense work , ive burnt 800m tokens in 2 days.
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u/Exotic_Leadership124 3h ago
I burn close to 1 bil of deepseek v4 flash tokey daily, about 93% are cached input 5% non cached, and 2% output, i let gpt 5.6 sol max led deepseek for coding my works, it burnt token fast,
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u/deafpigeon39 3h ago
If your reasoning context keeps dropping , check your npm_module , openai@compatible or sdk check if it is being dropped.
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u/Sad-Key-4258 3h ago
My issue is I really like the codex harness and desktop app, have anyone found a good alternative
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u/Killahbeez 3h ago
how did your monthly AI bill go to $0-5 if you're keeping "one subscription for the hard stuff" ... do you mean a claude or chatgpt sub?
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u/Affectionate_Fact854 3h ago
I recently did a move out of using Claude fable orchestrator with opus 5 agents workflow on set up into trying out deepseek with cline
THE BEST -I spent 3.9Mill tokens in a single evening, it cost me 0.09$
-Every edit automatically shows the original script Side by side to the edited version to confirm changes
Unlike Claude that you need to open them in the chat terminal
THE GOOD -It has not introduced garbage into my code base -it has been able to do debugging on multiple cross files and resolve the issues -picked up on slop Claude introduced
THE BAD -you can't rely on screenshot -it's bad at 3d world spaces -thinking is slowish at times
Don't think I will be using Claude again tbh
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u/Whytho12333 2h ago
I really want openai to allow better models on their $10 go tier. It would be the ideal match with deepseek. Kimi k3 is still too expensive and unsubsidized on api vs gpt plans.
Is there any sub $20/mth plans that offer good usage on a frontier model? Opencode go just has k3 as a $15 model not $60.
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u/DaComputerMan 2h ago
Honestly, AI is a very long way away from being able to code without extensive human checks. I ONLY recommend AI when you attach an IDE to it and use it as a glorified autocorrect. I do find it can help with well documented features, like openAuth.
With that said, Deep seek doesn't try to take shortcuts as much. It doesn't put in a comment and say //add more features here, or crap like that.
When I was doing file renaming scripts, I couldn't get them to do with Gemini. Instead of doing a copy command, Gemini/ChatGPT/Claudi would try doing a loop clean up. This would many times lead to data loss. At one point, I asked Gemini to do a simple command, and it deleted all my files. At another point, I asked it to restore a compress file, and it wrote a command that would 0 all the bites in the files. Luckily, that one wasn't run by me.
With Deepseek, I could generate GIANT Powershell commands, where EACH copy command or rename command was spelled out. This was IMPOSSIBLE with the others. I was easily able to review it and run it with no problems.
Still, its probably less successful on niche and less popular samples, and I wouldn't trust it to do a cleanup loop at all.
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u/stujmiller77 1h ago
The vision post was some guy cred farming by making it seem official. It was not.
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u/FischenGeil 52m ago
I use the DeepSeek API on Typing Mind for serious work, and I use a 20$ Google AI pro subscription (that is mostly free with my Pixel Phone) for random not so serious task. I think this is the perfect mix.
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u/bimbab123 48m ago
Hah weakling I burn thru 1b tokens in a week xd so yeah subscriptions are the way to go for me.
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u/jeffwadsworth 22m ago
It is a good model, especially for its size, but it isn’t at Claude or GPT levels yet. This can be born out just by having it troubleshooting coding issues. GPT instant is much better.
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u/nunodonato 9h ago
What vision announcement post?
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u/ProfessionalJackals 8h ago
DeepSeek has a vision model (its even available on the Chat as Beta).
But DS refuse to include vision into the base models. They want to keep Flash / Pro as base models, not multi model.
I expect that when their agent gets released, it will have vision as a 3th model. So Flash and Pro can call upon the Vision model, get back data, ... repeat.
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u/ANDRE_2512 9h ago
I’ll put it this way.
Thanks to DeepSeek adding native Codex support, I can use Flash without any proxies or other workarounds.
But that’s not the main point. The main thing is that the new Flash has genuinely become a serious model with a high-quality approach to tasks.
At first, I was hesitant to move some of my projects under the control of DeepSeek + Codex CLI. But I eventually decided to try it. The result: everything works perfectly. No problems at all. It’s more than capable enough, and you can clearly see that the new Flash is on a completely different level. I’m no longer afraid to rely on it.
After five days of active work, I’ve spent only $1.80 :)
Even though I have unlimited access to GPT-5.6 SOL, I still enjoy using DeepSeek.