Once they have their own coding agent which they seem to be working towards, I may start predominantly using their models. They seem to be doing all the "right" things, open sourcing models, publishing research, and keeping prices low for everyone.
Why do you need them to provide a coding agent? Just use their model with any off the shelf coding agent. I happen to prefer Pi, but use whatever works for you.
I probably have an unfounded assumption that whatever coding agent they make will work really well with their models, better than external harnesses. I don't have a good sense for how all the model + harness combinations compare, nor any good way to compare them myself, but generally believe model companies train their models to work best with their own harness.
I am more worried about accidental data leak (agent reading env file for example) with the Chinese hosted models compared to the US hosted models. Am I wrong to suspect that the Chinese government might be more likely to scan all chats and save useful information compared to the US government or company?
I hesitated to even post this comment as it sounds biased and xenophobic. I would love for someone to convince me I am wrong. Does anyone have any insight into the company behind deepseek hosting, and what their history of respecting data privacy is?
User data integrity definitely should be a concern. It's also known that regulations is being outpaced, so the cost of being/using frontier products is a double-edged sword for sure.
If you have not tried DeepdeekV4 you're missing out. The pricing makes it unbelievably good.
The chains of thought for Deepseek are very very interesting reads. Open code won't show them but do read them and you'll be surprised at how underrated the model is.
My model usage is very low but I still do pay directly to Deepseek regularly as my tribute and contribution to them open sourcing their models as my gratitude and showing support for what I deem positive for overall social good.
Yes - the model is REALLY good. I try Claude at work and Deepseek personally and this is the only model that works without trying to actively bankcrypt me.
Inference is cheap. I bet the financials of these Chinese companies are much saner looking than any of the big US AI companies which are bloated by investors.
That is some insane value.
I've been using GLM Coding Plan Max with GLM 5.1 for a while and i've tested DeepSeek V4 Pro maybe for 3 weeks now and I found it to be better than GLM 5.1 for complex coding tasks. I've used 65m tokens and with that price it cost me $1.5, that's really cheap.
their MLA architecture cuts KV cache by ~5-13x vs standard attention. that's why inference is actually cheaper to run, not just a price war to gain market share.
That's also a game changer for local inference. It unlocks long contexts, batched inference and storing the KV cache to disk on ordinary consumer platforms.
Props to them. That makes DeepSeek v4 Pro extremely cheap compared to others, even in the same category. Look at these prices per million outputs tokens:
It's actually even cheaper when you look at the cache read costs. Those costs can dominate in agent workflows and DeepSeek's cost for cache reads is insanely low comparatively. At $.003626/M tokens, the cheapest other thing on your list is >$.2/M tokens. That's on the scale of 100x cheaper.
Anyone using deepseek through a gateway (not sure if right term) so there's no data retention? At work we're going through a few hundred million tokens a day in our app (using anthropic models), and we're looking for something significantly cheaper
I have been using deepseek via deepinfra, afaik they provide no data retention. Im probably going to deploy the full model on their infra instead of paying credits at some point, so far the experience has been pretty good
Even at these prices I find claude and codex subscriptions to be cheaper than per-token pricing when my usage is hovering around the session limits. I guess the subscriptions are heavily subsidized.
30 comments:
Once they have their own coding agent which they seem to be working towards, I may start predominantly using their models. They seem to be doing all the "right" things, open sourcing models, publishing research, and keeping prices low for everyone.
You can use V4 Pro with Claude Code [1].
I tried it and it's impressive.
[1]: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...
Why do you need them to provide a coding agent? Just use their model with any off the shelf coding agent. I happen to prefer Pi, but use whatever works for you.
Yeah, I'm using Pi with their models through an OpenCode Go subscription and it works pretty well. 10 bucks and V4-Flash is virtually infinite.
I probably have an unfounded assumption that whatever coding agent they make will work really well with their models, better than external harnesses. I don't have a good sense for how all the model + harness combinations compare, nor any good way to compare them myself, but generally believe model companies train their models to work best with their own harness.
You no longer need "their coding agent". You can hook up claude code to use Deepseek. Works perfectly.
open code works with them today. I've been using it fulltime for 2 weeks so far.
I am more worried about accidental data leak (agent reading env file for example) with the Chinese hosted models compared to the US hosted models. Am I wrong to suspect that the Chinese government might be more likely to scan all chats and save useful information compared to the US government or company?
I hesitated to even post this comment as it sounds biased and xenophobic. I would love for someone to convince me I am wrong. Does anyone have any insight into the company behind deepseek hosting, and what their history of respecting data privacy is?
User data integrity definitely should be a concern. It's also known that regulations is being outpaced, so the cost of being/using frontier products is a double-edged sword for sure.
If you have not tried DeepdeekV4 you're missing out. The pricing makes it unbelievably good.
The chains of thought for Deepseek are very very interesting reads. Open code won't show them but do read them and you'll be surprised at how underrated the model is.
My model usage is very low but I still do pay directly to Deepseek regularly as my tribute and contribution to them open sourcing their models as my gratitude and showing support for what I deem positive for overall social good.
Yes - the model is REALLY good. I try Claude at work and Deepseek personally and this is the only model that works without trying to actively bankcrypt me.
Maybe the Chinese are playing the long game by trying to bankrupt the US competition? Because there's no way this is financially viable.
Small team, cheap electricity, very efficient models. Many western companies operate at a loss to gain market share. Why can't the Chinese?
Inference is cheap. I bet the financials of these Chinese companies are much saner looking than any of the big US AI companies which are bloated by investors.
Federal ban incoming then. They did it with cars already.
That is some insane value. I've been using GLM Coding Plan Max with GLM 5.1 for a while and i've tested DeepSeek V4 Pro maybe for 3 weeks now and I found it to be better than GLM 5.1 for complex coding tasks. I've used 65m tokens and with that price it cost me $1.5, that's really cheap.
I found that DSV4 wasn't as cheap as its token price. It burns tokens at a pretty high rate
their MLA architecture cuts KV cache by ~5-13x vs standard attention. that's why inference is actually cheaper to run, not just a price war to gain market share.
That's also a game changer for local inference. It unlocks long contexts, batched inference and storing the KV cache to disk on ordinary consumer platforms.
Props to them. That makes DeepSeek v4 Pro extremely cheap compared to others, even in the same category. Look at these prices per million outputs tokens:
DeepSeek V4 Pro: $0.87
Qwen 3.7 Max: $7.50
Grok 4.3: $2.50
GLM 1.5: $3.08
Opus 4.7: $25.00
GPT-5.5: $30.00
It's actually even cheaper when you look at the cache read costs. Those costs can dominate in agent workflows and DeepSeek's cost for cache reads is insanely low comparatively. At $.003626/M tokens, the cheapest other thing on your list is >$.2/M tokens. That's on the scale of 100x cheaper.
Great! I have been using DeepSeek 4 Flash high for everything lately.
First accessible model with useable 1 million context window for me.
Honestly I haven't even tried the Pro model. Flash was just so much more than I expected I just keep working with it. Thank you deepseek team
Anyone using deepseek through a gateway (not sure if right term) so there's no data retention? At work we're going through a few hundred million tokens a day in our app (using anthropic models), and we're looking for something significantly cheaper
I have been using deepseek via deepinfra, afaik they provide no data retention. Im probably going to deploy the full model on their infra instead of paying credits at some point, so far the experience has been pretty good
But do these prices apply if you use a third party go-between? I would expect they then charge their own prices?
opencode allegedly has contractual no-data-retention policies with their providers.
I recall reading about that in an issue or in their Discord server.
But I would contact them formally to verify that.
Neat. I like DS for secondary checks on code. Sometimes spots things other models don't
Even at these prices I find claude and codex subscriptions to be cheaper than per-token pricing when my usage is hovering around the session limits. I guess the subscriptions are heavily subsidized.
is this the Huawei chip difference?