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Comment by qarl | Hacker News Reader

Well... except that both companies offer insane subscription benefits to individuals. So a hosted open weights model still comes out more expensive.

I'd move in a second if it weren't so. But it looks like it will be about 5X more expensive for me. So.

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I was skeptical about this too. I used to have the $100/month Claude subscription. I'm still on my first month of just using open weight models, but so far I think the costs will be comparable. Maybe even less some months. But obviously it depends on your actual usage. I think it's worth trying it out instead of just assuming it will cost much more.

Right - but my usage is quite high and the $200/mo level gives you 4X as many tokens. That's the thing - they bribe you with crazy deals.

I looked into it a couple of months ago and it wasn't a win.

Using Deepseek v4.1 Flash on something like GreenGPT is probably about a euro a day if you use it all day. Hard to see how that is 5x more expensive.

Umm... I'm not sure... but if you're only paying a euro a day... it sounds like your only running one agent at a time?

Your token usage absolutely scales with parallel agents. So.

Sure, but assuming you're on the expensive 200usd a month plan with claude, 5x is 1000 USD a month. I mean, even if you're running 10x agents you're still only hitting $300 US a month, which is not close to 5x.

Anthropic doesn't really publish their limits so it's hard to do a direct comparison when these things come up. I just have doubts that DS 4.1 Flash is remotely close to 5x as expensive. Also, I've seen a lot of people claim that switching to it cuts their costs by a huge amount, which based on API per token costs of Claude seems to be far more likely.

Meh. I asked GPT-6 whether I should use Claude or Flash. After an annoying struggle to compare - it told me that Flash would cost me 1.7X Claude and give me a lesser model.

I'm not a super heavy user, but I pulled my token usage last week and it would have cost me about $10 USD per day to use DS via GreenPT. And DeepSeek is just a less capable model than the frontier models.

8.4M tokens cost me 0.26 EUR on GreenPT. 10 USD is 8.96 EUR. Based on my usage data that would be 289M tokens a day. Anthropic doesn't publish the token limits per plan so I can't compare, but that's quite a lot of tokens.

For my usage almost all of those tokens are cached input, which is why the cost is so low.

> except that both companies offer insane subscription benefits to individuals

For now.

Well... yes. Exactly.

Just need to wait until the gap between frontier and open source is narrow enough that you can switch with just a minor in performance. We are not there yet.

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