I recently made an AI Agent and surprisingly coding with DeepSeek V4 Flash is quite cheap. It probably has to do with the aggressive prompt caching. I'm using OpenRouter with Novita AI as the preferred provider.
Because (1) Huawei collab and (2) vLLM etc dont implement half of the inference optimisations deepseek proposed in their paper.
For me MiniMax 3 has really hit the sweet spot of being very cheap, though more than flash, but I’d also very capable.