It costs 20x more than the Chinese models I use. I just don’t need them anymore. Sure I’d use them if forced to for a job, but I don’t pay them outside of that anymore.
And my job won’t even pay for Claude now because it’s so ruinously expensive.
And my job won’t even pay for Claude now because it’s so ruinously expensive.
From my today's session with Sol:
- it actually failed to correctly understand a simple English grammar and logical implication of it, then when challenged it admitted its mistake but couldn't explain why it made it.
- for the code I am working on, I asked to create two PRs for the two small features (couple lines of code). It created one in upstream, as intended, and other one in my own fork. Just like that, out of nowhere, and called the job done.
- it said it would ask me to approve/amend the suggested PR message, it never did and fired off right away
- it keeps forgetting the changes it did itself; no context compaction was used
- it said it tested the change visually, but it did not even try
- hallucinated several facts despite me asking beforehand to check online.
On top of that, it ignores all of my AGENTS.md, which is short and concise. I mean I point it at ignoring it, it acknowledges and ignores again.
This is astonishingly bad and it is nowhere close to what Sol 5.6 was a month ago.
I can't deal with this sh*t anymore, I have no trust in the tools I use and both OpenAI and Anthropic do the same thing.
That seems hard to believe even with deepseek's own benchmarks. Not to mention for every person who says chinese ai is ahead of american labs, there's like 10 saying that they're benchmaxxed or that they're merely "decent value for money".
I use Deepseek 4.1 almost every day as well, it's nowhere close
It's not like rooting for a favorite football team. double woah!
I haven't had these issues in multiple model generations of models.
Failing to understand English grammar? Give me a break.
> it: That still attributes two claims to SI that SI does not make. `KB` is not reserved for 1,024 bytes, and `KiB` is the standardized binary symbol.
> me: where does it say that SI reserves KB?
> it: Nowhere. You said *KiB* was SI-standardized; you did not say SI reserves *KB*. I misread your sentence and argued against a claim you did not make.
It was correct to point me out on my mistake in essence, but still misunderstood my bracketed "(alongside the SI-standardized KiB)" sentence.
Sure, it wasn't a grammar mistake as such, more like a logical one, but it still shouldn't make it. I had more than one such issues already with it, this one was most pronounced.
What it interesting, though, is the number of corporate apologists my comment brought in. It's like it doesn't matter how many times OpenAI and Anthropic have botched some of the models while keeping the branding, some people would still die on that apologist hill.
Model and observed window | Messages | Retrieved actual $/message
DeepSeek v4-flash — all observed snapshots, 20 Jul–15 Sep | 4,610 | $0.0241
DeepSeek v4.1-flash — 11–27 Sep, before the 28 Sep billing change | 1,079 | $0.0576
DeepSeek v4.1-flash — 28 Sep, partial new billing window | 69 | $0.0365
GPT-6 Luna — 23–28 Sep, partial final day | 88 | $0.0329
I've subbed to Codex because I suspect at my usage rates the Codex Plus plan gives me more Luna messages than I'm using, and I've not really observed and better or worse intelligence performance. Interested to see how my $/message comes out after a month of usage on the Codex plan.
Something nice I've realised about my harness is that I can run different agents on different models so I can collect pricing data for a bunch in parallel.
[0]: pi-msg, run pi agents over xmpp https://github.com/zachpmanson/pi-msg
Anthropic's $20 subscription gives >$500 worth of credit by most measures, which is pretty similar, and you get a better model. Their raw API prices have fat margins.
And as another commenter said, Luna is the cost leader at the moment if you really need API pricing.
Mimo 2.6 Pro: 0.04/0.4/0.87
Sonnet 5.5: 0.2/2/10
Opus 5.5: Sonnet prices times 2
What I dont understand is their cache writes ($2.5). Why is that not covered by input cost?
The pricing model confuses me though (I presume by design, Hanlon be damned).
Microsoft has been releasing dog shit insanely overpriced software with decent alternatives for decades and is still used in every single company I work for or with.
Your take is the "current year is the year of the linux desktop" meme of "ai"
I don't think anything comes close to Microsoft's offerings. Macs suck. Ditto Linux.
cfengine is 33 years old
AI does not mean coders coding with agents all day long. AI integration is mostly for data processing, which is the promise and use of the APIs.
People use them, if for no other reason, because they are cheap, or are part of the Chromebook generation and have gotten used to it
Of their suite, Presentation and Sheets are the only ones people really have gripes about, Sheets by power users because it isn't Excel and it can never be, and Presentations because it's the ugly duckling of the suite
OpenAI and Anthropic have both transitioned into product companies. ChatGPT (the app) and Claude are both one-click installs that just work. People and businesses with pay for this.
People will also pay for the best (or the perception of being the best). Since it's hard to tell what "intelligence" really means model to model, there's a sense of safety in giving a task to the "best".
That's a payback of the infrastructure in a few weeks in theory. After a few weeks or a month, the only cost is electricity, and whatever they make after that is pure profit. This is why they can charge normal prices. Not $50 for 1M tokens.
Even 5.2 is doing really well in comparison here: https://labs.scale.com/leaderboard/sweatlas-refactoring
What's left are incompetent developers paired with people who get government contracts and leech off them. Ask me how I know.
You didn't discover some new trick for cost performance. And the rest of the world isn't dumb.
You're just too broke to afford the supercar and justifying the hooptie. It gets you to the kindergarten class after all. And that's all you need.