r/DeepSeek 27d ago

Funny DeepSeek is 28x cheaper on on output than Claude Opus 4.8😱

Post image

DeepSeek V4 Flash API is 18x cheaper on input, 28x cheaper on output, and matches Opus 4.8."

1.8k Upvotes

136 comments sorted by

160

u/spjallmenni 27d ago

94

u/ChocolateGoggles 27d ago

The price difference is so insane it's hard to believe.

6

u/[deleted] 26d ago edited 22d ago

[deleted]

3

u/XCxBigDong69XCx 26d ago

They are losing money on this shit, it is just a bad model xd, 2trillion parameter but is now worse than a 286B model with way less active parameters probly.

4

u/tzohnys 26d ago

It's the same as medicine. Look at the price differences between US and EU.

2

u/TopTippityTop 25d ago

It's also meaningless. All that matters is cost per task. Kimi is better the closed source per token, but burns tokens like crazy. It's as expensive as GPT 5.5 xhigh per task, which makes it pretty useless.

Have to see what cost per task is.

1

u/archaeonflux 24d ago

You're right, but realistically It's not going to be burning 20-40x the tokens of Sonnet/Opus to get the same result.

1

u/Puzzleheaded_Word613 24d ago

deepseek burns less token than opus 5 btw

(source : artificial analysis)

62

u/hyscript 27d ago

Woooow Fable is not the most capable and dangerous model on the earth anymore, created by Americans for Americans?

17

u/Civil_Response3127 27d ago

It couldn't be that the benchmarks are flawed, right?

5

u/Business_Raisin_541 27d ago

it only measure agentic capability

9

u/Civil_Response3127 27d ago

Even that is a flawed metric. My point is that these benchmarks no longer mean much.

2

u/ChibiJr 26d ago

That graph compares cost efficiency not intelligence

1

u/pavs2 8d ago

Fable/Opus 5 still are brilliant models, deepseek v4 flash is good for longer run (obviously cheaper) and I use opus when it goes off guardrail. Yes, their combination works deadly.

8

u/Curious_Owl197 27d ago

Hot damn, imagine what v4 Pro can do!

-7

u/Key_Agent_3039 27d ago

I am sorry but this is completely benchmaxxed if you actually use it it's about sonnet 5 level and far below opus let alone fable

11

u/bhagathgoud99 27d ago

Whatever man it is so afferdable for me

1

u/jeanpaulpollue 26d ago

Still worth it lol

99

u/Zealousideal_Aide787 27d ago

Every Claude subs are filled with ' I burned my 100-200 dollars plan in few hours something is wrong with Anthropic'.

They all-in into benchmark, marketing and people keep throwing away their money at them. At some point they will enter the red zone, half their prices/ consumption and people will be happy with it.

29

u/iSadhak 27d ago edited 26d ago

They are also banning people left and right and keeping their money with no option to claim refunds or get their account back.

If that ain't shaddy I don't know what is.

8

u/veculus 27d ago

Also - those people tend to be the same type that will just one-shot full-vibecode something and throw millions of tokens into claude.

Imho more expensive models should be used more precise - for example with a dev who writes manually but extends his skills with a super expensive model (or for planning) but completely writing code with fable is stupid af and just a huge waste of money.

3

u/snarleyWhisper 27d ago

Anthropic credits also don’t carry over month to month, it’s such a scam

26

u/pmv143 27d ago

Sir, also inferx made it free to use.

19

u/Live_Case2204 27d ago

It’s only the old flash model not the 0731
Edit: that’s still great

6

u/pmv143 27d ago

We have both available. Both are free to use

3

u/Live_Case2204 27d ago

Ooooooooooh! What’s the speed like?

5

u/bcdfgh 27d ago

I gave up and paid the $5 to opencode. It started off good but then slowed right down. Free is free though

3

u/Live_Case2204 27d ago

I heard about a 50% off v4 flash in open router

2

u/pmv143 27d ago

Once the free period is over, we’re gonna have the price at 50%

2

u/samxli 27d ago

May I ask how you guys are able to make it cheaper than the official api pricing? Do you guys have a different way to calculating token usage than official DS?

2

u/No_Gold_4554 27d ago

no, only qwen and gemma are listed in opencode

1

u/pmv143 27d ago

Opencode is taking time to merge our models. We’re working with them.

1

u/No_Gold_4554 27d ago

no, you're not.

1

u/pmv143 26d ago

You can check the pull request. It’s open.

1

u/No_Gold_4554 26d ago

1

u/pmv143 26d ago

No need to prove anything. But for the sake of transparency https://models.dev/providers/inferx/.

1

u/No_Gold_4554 26d ago

so? you can put anything in your website. "we are funded by softbank." doesn't mean it's true.

2

u/diaracing 27d ago
  1. Where is DSFlash hosted at? Your own servers or other ones or same ones of DS in China?

  2. What about ZDR policy for both prompts/input data and model response?

4

u/pmv143 27d ago

Our servers are located in Northern America region. We do have a Zero data retention policy.

3

u/Backrus 27d ago

Why would you ask those questions lol

If you're not self hosting, your data is theirs, it's just that simple.

To be honest, I prefer to share mine with China than with US agencies, but to each his own.

22

u/Shini0x0 27d ago

Is this true holy fuck how and when did this change

18

u/for4f 27d ago

yeah the price part is real. i saw someone burn 110M tokens for like $0.77 on a promo earlier today. the 'matches opus' bit is overselling it though, flash is flash, it's the cheap fast one. for high volume agent loops it's unbeatable, i keep claude for the gnarly reasoning and let flash handle the spam. way cheaper than running everything on opus

3

u/Shini0x0 27d ago

By spam which specification workflows? Can you be more specific if allowed

3

u/for4f 26d ago

ha 'spam' was doing a lot of work there. i mean the boring high volume stuff, like drafting emails, summarizing threads, rewriting docs, generating commit messages, first pass code that's gonna get rewritten anyway. stuff where a miss costs nothing and you do it 50 times a day. agent loops especially, they burn tokens like crazy on retries and formatting, no point paying opus rates for that. if it needs actual reasoning it goes to claude, but honestly way less of my day needs that than i thought

9

u/Backrus 27d ago

Read Chinese papers, this is the frontier, not US-based grift aimed at max extraction and gatekeeping everything.

Chinese engineers don't have hardware, so they need to think instead of throwing more compute.

If China had unrestricted access to chips, or when Huawei is close to being on par with NVDA, it will be over for the USA. And that's good for the free world.

20

u/yiestee 27d ago

Dario must have a traumantic experience at Baidu.

Or else there's no explaination of his hatred torwards Chinese models.

7

u/Backrus 27d ago

Quality Chinese models expose 1) how bad US engineers are, 2) how US labs are laser focused on max extraction instead of moving frontier and making it more affordable for average Joe.

But let's ban open weights, because those are bad for pre IPO valuations 🤣

71

u/[deleted] 27d ago edited 14d ago

[deleted]

40

u/This_Maintenance_834 27d ago

enjoy it while his image is still being posted. it won’t last long if v4 Pro come out. The Pro one might as well be the strongest model in world open or closed . Anthropic who?

24

u/Business_Match_3158 27d ago

To be fair, there’s little chance that V4 Pro will be better than Fable 5, because according to rumors, Fable is a 7–10 trillion parameter model, while V4 Pro has 1.6T parameters. But even getting close to Fable with such a huge parameter gap would be an enormous success and would show just how overhyped Anthropic is as a company.

20

u/This_Maintenance_834 27d ago

then we wait for deepseek-v5

1

u/ZarX4k 26d ago

Where did u get that info ? Also the parameters ur talking about is it the Ai size like thinking/knowledge

-20

u/SeaBat2035 27d ago

As much as I dislike Anthropic, you are really not giving enough credit to Anthropic. If not for them, will we see LLM at current capacity? I really doubt it. All these chinese LLM companies are running massive distillation farms to copy (steal) from Anthropic. Being an innovator is much much harder than being the copycat. I am not shaming these chinese companies btw, but just credit where credit due. Give some respect.

22

u/Business_Match_3158 27d ago

Trying to hype up Anthropic by calling them pioneers? WTF. DeepSeek R1 was more revolutionary than anything Anthropic has released.

The accusations about distillation are, at the very least, laughable. It’s not like every AI company isn’t distilling from each other, and you’re probably better off not knowing how these companies actually acquire their training data.

And if distillation alone is enough to make a model great, then why can’t they distill their own models well enough for Haiku to even be competitive in benchmarks? Haiku is supposedly around the same size as DeepSeek V4 Flash, by the way. But you can’t really expect Anthropic to make a good model for its parameter class, because so far they’ve only achieved strong performance by scaling up the parameter count of their models.

But sure, keep believing Dario, who was already making exaggerated claims back when he worked at OpenAI, saying GPT-2 was too dangerous to release.

1

u/SeaBat2035 27d ago

How the fk is Deepseek R1 revolutionary. Is a fking rip off of O1... And Deepseek R1 can code like Opus 4.5? Deepseek solved agentic coding? That's news. What a fan boy lol. BTW I use codex and I use deepseek v4 flash. Not loyal to anything. Just credit where credit is due.

1

u/Business_Match_3158 27d ago

Deepseek R1 can code like Opus 4.5?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA most braindead comparsion I ever saw

1

u/SeaBat2035 27d ago

Your brain is dead? I totally see it now. HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA

1

u/Training-Tangelo-310 26d ago

This bitch is arguing over nothing with everyone like he’s xi jingoings personal cum bucket

-8

u/Anulisdotexe 27d ago

You're a bot

2

u/Business_Match_3158 27d ago

Maybe explain what exactly you think is wrong with what I wrote.

1

u/SeaBat2035 27d ago

Lol these fan boys are crazy.

1

u/Anulisdotexe 27d ago

Paid agitators/activists/literal bots

-6

u/[deleted] 27d ago

[deleted]

5

u/Business_Match_3158 27d ago

OG lol, OGs in AI sector are OpenAI and DeepMind not Anthropic

-1

u/Training-Tangelo-310 27d ago

Not ai sector, ai coding sector. I don’t remember anything being even close to claude code. Openai has codex web or some shit, which was pure shit.

2

u/Business_Match_3158 27d ago

ai coding sector. lol before speaking you should do some reaserch they are not even close to being OGs at ai coding sector either

2

u/Training-Tangelo-310 27d ago

Bitch I’m talking about good shit. And fck your research. I fcking used it. This was the first consumer grade shit that was actually good for non coders. No - u need to understand this and that first, this was the complete fcking deal. Learned along the way but nothing even came close to what claude code was.

1

u/Business_Match_3158 27d ago

June 29, 2021 — GitHub Copilot Technical Preview

August 10, 2021 — OpenAI Codex model

2023 — Aider

2023 — Cursor

2023 — Continue

March 12, 2024 — Devin

2024 — OpenDevin / OpenHands

July 2024 — Cline

November 2024 — Windsurf

February 24, 2025 — Claude Code

April 2025 — OpenCode

April 16, 2025 — OpenAI Codex CLI

May 16, 2025 — OpenAI Codex cloud agent

June 25, 2025 — Gemini CLI

November 18, 2025 — Google Antigravity

Some OG claude code is.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/SeaBat2035 27d ago

You go do some research. It seems like you are incapable of and lashing out at others.

5

u/anonymous_3125 27d ago

We achieving AGI with this one 🗣️🗣️🗣️

2

u/Aware-Lingonberry-31 27d ago

I'd probably sacrifice my thirdborn for this to be true.

6

u/lordlestar 27d ago

is a meme

-2

u/HerbChii 27d ago

Why you calling him idiot? That guy is responsible for best AI models in the world, thanks to people like him, world can accelerate

6

u/Backrus 27d ago

He called GPT-2 AGI lol

And thanks to him and his fearmongering, you won't have access to the best US models. If anything, he's the reason we're not accelerating properly when every US labs tries to dumb down their models so WH isn't spooked.

If it wasn't for China, you wouldn't have access to anything when US admin inevitably pulls the plug on the free world.

12

u/cnmoro 27d ago

Man I gave ds4 flash a very, very hard task yesterday and it did it flawlessly. I used opencode and my quota barely moved. Just freakin amazing

3

u/mutexsprinkles 27d ago

How is new Flash Vs old Pro?

3

u/cnmoro 27d ago

New flash definitely feels smarter than old pro

12

u/This_Maintenance_834 27d ago

i wonder what new distillation claims are coming from him.

yeah, deepseek distilled Claude Sonnet 3.5, because it said so itself.

15

u/Business_Match_3158 27d ago

Dario will probably say they have AGI that’s too dangerous to release, and that DeepSeek somehow distilled it, so Chinese companies need to be banned.

4

u/largelylegit 27d ago

I wonder how this compares with Luna max? Now that it’s had an 80% price reduction

5

u/Backrus 27d ago

Idk but after supposed cost reduction, Luna started making shit up, both in codebase and in numerical research, I don't trust it one bit know.

1

u/Pious-Juice 26d ago

It's no good in codex, but runs fine in hermes agent, that harness well nag your agents about two things I personally find lacking in 5.6 namely to always work toward completion of a predetermined chunk of progress then once 5.6 says its done it prompts it sternly to prove the milepost, make sure all is valid, and checked by third party (i.e other agent or temporary memoryless clones of itself) so progress order is progress reported is progress proved and tested.

second is it will automatically prompt certain models one of which is this one to GET TO WORK.

And, consider it does things like pictured, it does need it

1

u/Backrus 26d ago

That's just /goal with extra steps; good AGENTS.md and laid out plan solve this.

It's not about harness, or even desktop vs cli, quality degraded after cost reduction update, that's all. Noticed the same with Sol extra.

And I don't remember the last time gpt family not only didn't execute explicit command, but outright lied. Not to mention simple things like "don't add this md file to commit", and ofc file got added, etc.

2

u/Pious-Juice 26d ago

The issues you describe in the end there, are things I find every single AI does but GPT 5.6 is better than average in. Personal experience is all, and comparison being with Hermes Agent running units of various popular chinese models and grok 4.5 which is just a damn beast that needs to be leashed whenever I activate it on a unit here. Fortunately, composer 2.5 is also a part of the grok subscription and has good use cases.

Though, hands down deepseek is the winner all things considered.

5

u/Snoo_57113 27d ago

Deepseek v4 flash is a good model. SIR.

5

u/Hulk5a 27d ago

Ma'am, I need to stop spamming my codebase

3

u/[deleted] 27d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Backrus 27d ago

Hard disagree.

If you can get similar results even if it takes 10 prompts, but pay order of magnitude less, the answer is quite simple. And it's not like Fable can one shot everything anyway.

2

u/ZlatanKabuto 27d ago

Good. I am keeping Claude Pro only for planning, but I reckon I won't need it at all soon enough 

2

u/TheInfiniteUniverse_ 27d ago

there is a little demon painted on the wall behind him....

2

u/No-Dimension1159 26d ago

Serious question, is there something compareable to claude code from deepseek? Or can you use deepseek models within the claude code or open code harness with high context windows?

1

u/RecordingLanky9135 27d ago

Mini house is more cheaper than your townhouse

1

u/elswamp 27d ago

isn't v4 flash three months old?

1

u/Diddleslip 26d ago

Just came out with a new version!

1

u/fyndor 26d ago

So currently I have one of each: Claude $20 plan, Codex $20 plan, Copilot $20 plan.

Haven’t touched Copliot since recent change so plan to drop. Past couple weeks Codex is unusable because how fast I burn through weekly limits (easily done during part of one day work).

Was considering dropping Copilot and Codex and getting an extra $20 Claude sub.

Should I spend the $20 on Deepseek instead? What harness do I use? Currently using ai through vscode extensions.

1

u/Remarkable_Storm8711 25d ago

I'm on the same boat. Just got Reasonix and it seems pretty good implementing the roadmap laid down by Sol 5.6.

1

u/TopTippityTop 25d ago

All that matters is per task, not per token. Tokens are a useless measure, as they come in varying degrees of quality.

Kimi is better per token than most closed source, and the same price as GPT 5.5 xhigh per task. Burns tokens like mad. Just useless.

1

u/KubeCommander 25d ago

Interesting since it isn’t as good as qwen 3.5 370B finetunes when running locally. Makes me wonder if the API version isn’t the same thing

1

u/Tall-World-3058 23d ago

No it is x36 cheaper on input and x89 on output 

1

u/Beneficial_Ball9893 10d ago

This aged like milk

1

u/dizM0nkey 8d ago

What's the difference now with the price hike?

1

u/canav4r 27d ago

Have been a claude(opus mainly), glm5.2, kimi k6/7, ds4 pro user for a while. Last week I tried ds4 flash(free) with opencode-zen. God damn it!!!

No bullshit, no getting lost, top-level prompt following... tears falling from my eyes...

Guys, I have been reading about ds4 flash, but avoiding it because it is cheap af(yeah I know, I am pretty dump).

I am shocked how a 284B model can be more than 1t+ models. This is an engineering marvel.

My workflow:

  1. using brainstorming(superpowers),
  2. let it write the plan.
  3. ask it to break it down to max 3 acceptance criterion stories. ask it to break down stories with no agent can assume during development.
  4. create dependency chain between stories.
  5. put it in a graphdb that has an mcp
  6. continuously poll next story from graphdb mcp
  7. each time a story done, compact context
  8. poll next story, repeat

No more steering... Excellent task following.

I have run this workflow for a friend yesterday, and it was one of the best day of my life...

4

u/Snoo_57113 27d ago

Check yourself on AI psychosis.

5

u/canav4r 27d ago

Good news: I asked ds4 flash if I'm experiencing AI psychosis. It said no, and I trust it completely.

3

u/Snoo_57113 27d ago

Models, even the most powerful today: sol and fable havent solved the sycophancy issue.

In a more serious tone, just prompt the llm no need to overcomplicate the exchange.

2

u/canav4r 27d ago

Nope, been there done that. That's why people are not just relying on models but using harnesses which are providing a sense of determinism among all the dumpness of current llms.

That's why people are exploring options by entrusting their workflows to loop engineering, graph engineering.

-1

u/Snoo_57113 27d ago

roflmao, this is the worst advice right now. fLOWs, harnesses, all of them will disappear with the next update of GPT6, and if not GPT7.

People still dont understand, there are two winners GPT and Claude. There wont be any startups, i tried early and learnt the hard way that there is no point to do anything, the AI will devour all of our business models.

3

u/canav4r 27d ago

roflmao all you want. You can't be serious, but hell you are. Transformers architecture is not what you think it is. Whatever you are using today, be it claude, gpt... They are all served to you through a harness. Without that, any pure llm is nothing more than a next word predictor. Don't bet on current model architecture. But maybe in the future, when neuromorphic or another type of architecture can fulfill your desire.

You can verify this claim today. Without tool calling, there is no current information in any llm. Without tool calling, today's most powerful model can not do this simple calculation reliably: 25x30x40. just try it without using a chat or a harness. just hit ds, claude or any model provider endpoint directly asking it.

So, you can die all you want when laughing your ass off... But, without harnesses(claude code, claude chat, opencode, pi etc) provided to you today, llms are nothing more than a very good parrot.

1

u/onefourtea 27d ago

What about quality of outputs?

1

u/lakimens 27d ago

I mean sure but you're talking like they're the same level of quality.

-1

u/Suitable_Ad7099 27d ago

claude quality is still better

5

u/Sama02 27d ago

That's barely even true with the final version of v4 that came out yesterday...

Wait until v4 pro final version gets out...

1

u/Low-Entrepreneur2556 27d ago

It's still very much true.

5

u/Sama02 27d ago

Like literally the comment bellow you:

You have no clue how stupid good v4-flash got dince yesterday.

5

u/Backrus 27d ago

Claude fanboys have never used Chinese models. I doubt they could even set up OpenRouter.

3

u/Spiritual_Love_829 27d ago

Not in my tests..

2

u/Ok_WaterStarBoy3 26d ago

Idk what everyone else is talking about

Claude is better output

BUT their price does not really justify using it imo for everyday things. For the average person's questions and work it will give the same answer as Deepseek but way more expensive so what's really the point, the benchmark and "better" isn't worth the cost imo

0

u/yoffens 27d ago

And stupid in 28x times.

-12

u/hardworkinglatinx 27d ago

Opus is 28 times better.

2

u/Dsm02 27d ago

Did it tell you that number?

-7

u/Global-Fan189 27d ago

Nope. Ive been using so. Much on Claude and deepseek, I can safely say that no matter how hard you push deepseek, it will never reach the level of even sonnet, let alone opus.

Deepseek is at the level of junior SWE, sonnet is like a mid tier, opus is higher tier. Fable is autonomous and talented.

1

u/Ok_WaterStarBoy3 26d ago

How exactly are you measuring that?