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Comment by mekpro | Hacker News Reader

Even though their API price is cheap compared to OpenAI/Anthropic, I still can’t “afford” to use their API because the subscriptions from OAI/Anthropic provide far higher value and peace of mind. I know for sure how much I need to pay each month. I believe most developers fall into this category as well, where $20/$100/$200 from Anthropic/OAI provides more value.

This raises the question: why doesn’t DeepSeek provide a subscription service as well? Is it a better move to have a single pricing model like they currently do?

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I'm not sure what you're on about. Load your account with X dollars and then your monthly bill is capped to X dollars.

or by 5 opencode subscriptions, and have $800 of ds4.1-flash for $200. I'm skeptical that the average dev will manage to burn through the equivalent of $800 of ds4.1-flash if they spend even a bit of time optimizing their token usage.

I did use deepseek via API and it can easily cost 3$ per day for my workload. On the other hand Luna 6 on 20$ subscription from OpenAI cover by usage for whole month. However, `ccusage codex` command suggested that my Luna6 token cost is around ~100$ monthly.

``` or by 5 opencode subscriptions, and have $800 of ds4.1-flash for $200. I'm skeptical that the average dev will manage to burn through the equivalent of $800 of ds4.1-flash if they spend even a bit of time optimizing their token usage. ```

This is my point. For most developer, subscription model (with subsidize) is preferable. And what I'm wondering is, as suggestted by very cheap cost-per-token from DeepInfer, why don't Deepseek persued subscription market as well ? What make subscription not make sense for them to provide ?

> On the other hand Luna 6 on 20$ subscription from OpenAI cover by usage for whole month. However, `ccusage codex` command suggested that my Luna6 token cost is around ~100$ monthly.

This is where the model comparisons become hard. Luna and DS4.1-flash aren't comparable models in terms of coding performance, DS is far ahead. Or at least so say the benchmarks. So if you're good with the performance from Luna, there isn't even really a reason to look at DS. You'd pay more for capabilities you don't need. But that doesn't answer your main point of, what to do if you DO needs DS4.1-flash performance.

> And what I'm wondering is, as suggestted by very cheap cost-per-token from DeepInfer, why don't Deepseek persued subscription market as well ? What make subscription not make sense for them to provide ?

By bet, given that they've introduced time-of-use pricing, is hardware capacity. They don't have the capacity to handle more demand, which is what coding plan would immediately produce.

A $200 Claude Code subscription gives you far more usage than $200 would buy at API rates.

It's not just "here is $200 worth of tokens that you can use".

Yes, I am aware. You get roughly $12,000 worth of tokens.

My point was that if the concern was about spend per month, than $200 of opencode subs will provide most people with more than DS4.1-flash usage.

You know your subscription is unsustainably subsidised by debt and likely to change at any moment, yet relying on it provides more peace of mind than buying from someplace that are extremely transparent about their costs. That's an interesting approach to say the least

While I agree with the debt part, API pricing can also change at any moment. Well, anything can change at any moment, it's still wild west outta here.

I agree with this. While I realise the current subscription levels probably aren't sustainable long term for this month and probably next month, and who knows how many months after that, it is the best option.

I'm ready and willing to change as soon as I need to, but for the moment I'm going to take advantage of the subscription costs offered as it lets me know exactly how much I'm going to pay each month.

I'm on an Alibaba Cloud Model Studio TokenPlan subscription, and DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, Deepseek 4 Pro are available, alongside various Qwen and glm models.

I've been using Qwen 3.8 Flash on an $18/month Standard Plan, and haven't gone close to consuming my credits. It got close to rollover date, and I gave it a decent nudge for 2 days, and used... about 2% of my monthly quota. Obviously one of the Max models could burn tokens a lot faster, but I'm very happy with the outputs one of the Flash models has been generating.

I need to give it something harder to do, it seems.

Even the Alibaba $6/month plan supplies a reasonable amount of API use, and Qwen 3.8 Max is a killer model for long time frame agentic use.

Literally everything I do is Open Source software and Open Content writing so I am fine with the lack of privacy using direct Chinese APIs. And, for a little more spend, just use US companies like Fireworks.ai or Ollama Cloud for more privacy, or run on-premise locally and get the best grade of privacy.

Currently this is true only for Anthropic's $20/month plan. I do a lot of work without reaching my limit. OAI's similar plan on the other hand isn't worth it - it used to be a great plan in the begining when they needed to catch up, but now I reach my limit very quickly on it. The only reason I keep it is because my entire family is using this account for their chatgpt usage.

The more expensive subscriptions are just not worth it for individuals. Using deepseek even at API prices is better value. If you're a company it might be a different story.

Maybe at a certain point their capacity is sufficiently being used up by the "full cost" API usage, and offering cheaper package deals would just cut into their profit because they can't get more inference?

I do not think OAI/Anthropic make the biggest share of their revenue from subscription. The largest share is from API spends. That is what DeepSeek or others aim for as well.

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