>they are subsidizing a huge amount of tokens at cost
This is absolutely false, because other providers serving the Deepseek models on OpenRouter are also able to offer very low prices, and they don't have the money to subsidize anything.
This is absolutely false, because other providers serving the Deepseek models on OpenRouter are also able to offer very low prices, and they don't have the money to subsidize anything.
Furthermore, V4 pro was designed to run on 4 Huawei Ascend GPUs which are much cheaper than the nvidia setup others use, and deepseek probably also got some free hardware for their collab.
Hence it is entirely possible their inference costs are significantly lower than other providers.
If any providers are able to turn able to sustainably turn a profit, OpenRouter allows them to compete in an open market to process your tokens (or anyone else's tokens).
Thus anyone subsidizing tokens bears the brunt of the compute load and gains not much more than name recognition and tokens to train on, but since switching to a different provider is a matter of changing one setting in the config panel (and can be set to auto-switch based on price), switching costs are very low. Providers of open models via OpenRouter have almost zero ability to lock-in users.
So this claim that all 13 providers are selling subsidized inference is... a tough claim to swallow. Maybe some of them are, but all of them? I assume at least some providers want to show profitablity, and are pricing their service accordingly.
https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro/pricing
https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/routing/provider-selection