From the author:
"Also, for those that are curious: the total cost of running the Deepseek model on OpenRouter was 22 cents. Yes, $0.22. You don’t need an expensive subscription or sell your soul to Altman or Amodei."
It feels like for RE work, Chinese models are currently the only ones that actually let you do that, because the US ones want a healthy subscription plan or an government/enterprise customer.