Hi people, just wanted to ask if anyone has had any experiences running the paid version of DeepSeek as their daily AI driver? It’s pricing is almost 30 times lower than ChatGPT for example, so looking into it seriously as a study/coding aid.
I’d look to see if it’s cheaper to self host first. It’s big, and I ain’t seen hard drive prices lately, but might be worth it. Open source and all.
That would be cool, but I don’t have the hardware. Just an old laptop.
I have had good results from Deepseek V4 Flash 0731, but the way I use it is:
- Let deepseek take a first pass
- Have a second agent review
Also GPT 5.6 Luna is also well priced and for smaller context behaves similar to Terra at high reasoning.
If budget is tight I would say Deepseek Flash implement and Luna review.
Model diversity, at least on my experience, leads to better results. Also, have found the GPT family of models seem to do well as reviewers (at least on my testing / use cases seem to do better on reviewing that coding).
paid version of DeepSeek
If you meant using the Deepseek company plan vs just using their model, I have not used it directly from Deepseek. I use OpenRouter / Venice.ai.
Very insightful, thank you! How much does your set up cost you per month (on average)?
I have
- Claude code / GPT subscriptions
- openrouter about $30 to $50/month
- venice.ai about $30 to $50/month
I am constantly testing and have found that deepseek v4 flash, glm 5.3 flash and GPT 5.6 Luna do a pretty decent job with most simple tasks. So often they are the ones I go to first for the simple stuff or do a first pass for a lot of things. It depends whether I still have credits for the claude / gpt plans
You can really do quite a bit with deepseek v4 flash cheaply. Also, remember that you pay a lot more for output than for input so if you had something like
- Deepseek does most of the work
- A more expensive model checks <— there is a lot less writing there
Or if you want model diversity
- Deepseek flash 0731 does work
- GLM 5.3 flash doest first round of checks
- More expensive model checks
Not sure if you are using PRDs or a more free-format development… if you are using PRD suggest this
- Create your tasks
- Have Tencent Hy3 (not hy4) / GLM 5.3 flash review the task and give feedbacks. Imagine you have task.md then task-hy3.md and task-glm.md then use GPT Luna to review all 3
- DSF 0731 does work
- your choice of reviewer(s)
That will likely increase your quality for relatively little cost. Suggest you try and automate as much as possible.
I have found that multi model workflows, at least for me, increases quality, at the expense of time and complexity.
Thanks for the details! I wasn’t planning on going that elaborate, since for now I don’t have any big projects in mind. Just to get some study support mainly.
You’ve obviously given a lot of thought to your setup, what do you build with it if you don’t mind me asking?
Over the last 3 months I have been working on my own agentic editor. Hope to make the code available within the next 2 weeks. So right now is mostly Claude Code and my own editor (named codemeld). Before that it was Claude Code and Open code.
For PRD I created a PRD framework PRDwise. That has worked well for me and plan to make that into a community. I have really bee focusing most of my pare time on the editor, but want to get back to the PRD framework soon to make it more multi-user friendly (i.e. so can be used by a team instead of a single individual).
Just to get some study support mainly
In that case, and it depends exactly on your needs, you may to consider something bigger than DSF 0731. If you find that DSF 0731 can’t handle something you could give GLM 5.3 a try. It is more expensive, but still reasonable. Or if you can afford it, the lowest tier of Claude plans is a reasonable value for casual use.
Very helpful, thank you!