I've had a ton of success when pairing Opus 4.7 for planning w/ DeepSeek V4 Flash in opencode. Best part is DeepSeek V4 Flash is Free through opencode Zen.
Once they have their own coding agent which they seem to be working towards, I may start predominantly using their models. They seem to be doing all the "right" things, open sourcing models, publishing research, and keeping prices low for everyone.
At this point in the AI wars, it is probably better to have more users of Claude code rather than restrict which LLMs it can connect to. Claude code is probably (currently at least) stickier than the LLM model itself. Getting people into the Claude code ecosystem is worth it.
Later, they can always lock it down more or add Claude LLM only features to it.
Why do you need them to provide a coding agent? Just use their model with any off the shelf coding agent. I happen to prefer Pi, but use whatever works for you.
I probably have an unfounded assumption that whatever coding agent they make will work really well with their models, better than external harnesses. I don't have a good sense for how all the model + harness combinations compare, nor any good way to compare them myself, but generally believe model companies train their models to work best with their own harness.
Using it with Pi and can only report good thing so far. I'm very impressed by how good it is (also it's way slower than Claude Sonnet and GPT-5.5 and often thinks "too much" before starting).
If you have not tried DeepdeekV4 you're missing out. The pricing makes it unbelievably good.
The chains of thought for Deepseek are very very interesting reads. Open code won't show them but do read them and you'll be surprised at how underrated the model is.
My model usage is very low but I still do pay directly to Deepseek regularly as my tribute and contribution to them open sourcing their models as my gratitude and showing support for what I deem positive for overall social good.
Yes - the model is REALLY good. I try Claude at work and Deepseek personally and this is the only model that works without trying to actively bankcrypt me.
That is some insane value.
I've been using GLM Coding Plan Max with GLM 5.1 for a while and i've tested DeepSeek V4 Pro maybe for 3 weeks now and I found it to be better than GLM 5.1 for complex coding tasks. I've used 65m tokens and with that price it cost me $1.5, that's really cheap.
I am more worried about accidental data leak (agent reading env file for example) with the Chinese hosted models compared to the US hosted models. Am I wrong to suspect that the Chinese government might be more likely to scan all chats and save useful information compared to the US government or company?
I hesitated to even post this comment as it sounds biased and xenophobic. I would love for someone to convince me I am wrong. Does anyone have any insight into the company behind deepseek hosting, and what their history of respecting data privacy is?
It's not an unreasonable concern, which is why most US companies prefer to go with AWS bedrock, or even one of the AI labs, and typically request zero data retention agreements. But leaking is a concern no matter where it's hosted, it's just the incentives that change IMO. For example, the labs do scan every chat and train on data not covered under enterprise ZDR agreements. Law enforcement can request access to all user data with a valid warrant or in an emergency context [1]
If you're interested in trying DeepSeek V4 privately, you can try Tinfoil (tinfoil.sh) where all models are hosted in an attested secure hardware enclave, making the inference end-to-end private. Full disclosure: I'm one of the cofounders.
This is a risk although then this is fortunately a model that isn't tied to Chinese hosting. But indeed something to consider if using straight DeepSeek.com.
I think there is a nonzero chance of that happening. Beijing could at any point decide that DeepSeek has become too powerful and/or is a major export and start to insert themselves (assuming they have not already).
There are widespread reports about how foreign actors (not limited to China) have infiltrated critical networks across many industries in the US en masse and are simply waiting for the right time to exploit them. Frontier models are simply another attack vector (and much more easily exploitable when you think about it).
The fact is that there is potential for this with any cloud-hosted model, whether it is intentional by the actual company building the models or a malicious actor is able to exploit a vulnerability.
User data integrity definitely should be a concern. It's also known that regulations is being outpaced, so the cost of being/using frontier products is a double-edged sword for sure.
More likely? US tech leaders have been fully capitulating to the surveillance state for over a decade. Why do I care what China does with my data? I don’t live in China and never plan to.
The tech bro threat model has always been pure jingoism and xenophobia. Ironically, the worst thing a Chinese company has done with my data is sell Tiktok to an American technofascist.
their MLA architecture cuts KV cache by ~5-13x vs standard attention. that's why inference is actually cheaper to run, not just a price war to gain market share.
That's also a game changer for local inference. It unlocks long contexts, batched inference and storing the KV cache to disk on ordinary consumer platforms.
If you think heavily subsidizing AI models isn’t financially viable, I have some bad news for you about US AI companies.
Deepseek has made some incredible advancements in model efficiency, and more importantly actually publishes those advancements so everyone can benefit from them.
Inference is cheap. I bet the financials of these Chinese companies are much saner looking than any of the big US AI companies which are bloated by investors.
US suppliers are fine and won't go bankrupt, they can just focus on serving bigger "Pro" class models from their large datacenters. In fact cheap AI makes the bigger and smarter models more useful because it's smart enough to draft a clear question to the model, which helps minimize wasted tokens.
Props to them. That makes DeepSeek v4 Pro extremely cheap compared to others, even in the same category. Look at these prices per million outputs tokens:
It's actually even cheaper when you look at the cache read costs. Those costs can dominate in agent workflows and DeepSeek's cost for cache reads is insanely low comparatively. At $.003626/M tokens, the cheapest other thing on your list is >$.2/M tokens. That's on the scale of 100x cheaper.
Anyone using deepseek through a gateway (not sure if right term) so there's no data retention? At work we're going through a few hundred million tokens a day in our app (using anthropic models), and we're looking for something significantly cheaper
I have been using deepseek via deepinfra, afaik they provide no data retention. Im probably going to deploy the full model on their infra instead of paying credits at some point, so far the experience has been pretty good
Even at these prices I find claude and codex subscriptions to be cheaper than per-token pricing when my usage is hovering around the session limits. I guess the subscriptions are heavily subsidized.
I've had a ton of success when pairing Opus 4.7 for planning w/ DeepSeek V4 Flash in opencode. Best part is DeepSeek V4 Flash is Free through opencode Zen.
Once they have their own coding agent which they seem to be working towards, I may start predominantly using their models. They seem to be doing all the "right" things, open sourcing models, publishing research, and keeping prices low for everyone.
You can use V4 Pro with Claude Code [1].
I tried it and it's impressive.
[1]: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...
Surprised Anthropic hasn't done anything to restrict Claude Code from using other providers.
At this point in the AI wars, it is probably better to have more users of Claude code rather than restrict which LLMs it can connect to. Claude code is probably (currently at least) stickier than the LLM model itself. Getting people into the Claude code ecosystem is worth it.
Later, they can always lock it down more or add Claude LLM only features to it.
Why do you need them to provide a coding agent? Just use their model with any off the shelf coding agent. I happen to prefer Pi, but use whatever works for you.
What's the best way to use it with Pi, OpenRouter?
I probably have an unfounded assumption that whatever coding agent they make will work really well with their models, better than external harnesses. I don't have a good sense for how all the model + harness combinations compare, nor any good way to compare them myself, but generally believe model companies train their models to work best with their own harness.
RL with the harness inputs and outputs of users is one of the primary improvers of model performance, a self perpetuating flywheel.
Yeah, I'm using Pi with their models through an OpenCode Go subscription and it works pretty well. 10 bucks and V4-Flash is virtually infinite.
You no longer need "their coding agent". You can hook up claude code to use Deepseek. Works perfectly.
antirez's ds4-agent works quite fine. It runs on any Apple Silicon device with 96GB RAM or more.
open code works with them today. I've been using it fulltime for 2 weeks so far.
Using it with Pi and can only report good thing so far. I'm very impressed by how good it is (also it's way slower than Claude Sonnet and GPT-5.5 and often thinks "too much" before starting).
If you have not tried DeepdeekV4 you're missing out. The pricing makes it unbelievably good.
The chains of thought for Deepseek are very very interesting reads. Open code won't show them but do read them and you'll be surprised at how underrated the model is.
My model usage is very low but I still do pay directly to Deepseek regularly as my tribute and contribution to them open sourcing their models as my gratitude and showing support for what I deem positive for overall social good.
[delayed]
Yes - the model is REALLY good. I try Claude at work and Deepseek personally and this is the only model that works without trying to actively bankcrypt me.
Perhaps unintentional, but I find 'bankrypt' to be a thoroughly interesting portmonteau.
I'm not sure if it's when you run out of crypto, or when your bank gets hit by ransomeware.
Which models do folks use for openclaw nowadays
That is some insane value. I've been using GLM Coding Plan Max with GLM 5.1 for a while and i've tested DeepSeek V4 Pro maybe for 3 weeks now and I found it to be better than GLM 5.1 for complex coding tasks. I've used 65m tokens and with that price it cost me $1.5, that's really cheap.
I think Deepseek uses much more tokens than other models.
I am more worried about accidental data leak (agent reading env file for example) with the Chinese hosted models compared to the US hosted models. Am I wrong to suspect that the Chinese government might be more likely to scan all chats and save useful information compared to the US government or company?
I hesitated to even post this comment as it sounds biased and xenophobic. I would love for someone to convince me I am wrong. Does anyone have any insight into the company behind deepseek hosting, and what their history of respecting data privacy is?
It's not an unreasonable concern, which is why most US companies prefer to go with AWS bedrock, or even one of the AI labs, and typically request zero data retention agreements. But leaking is a concern no matter where it's hosted, it's just the incentives that change IMO. For example, the labs do scan every chat and train on data not covered under enterprise ZDR agreements. Law enforcement can request access to all user data with a valid warrant or in an emergency context [1]
If you're interested in trying DeepSeek V4 privately, you can try Tinfoil (tinfoil.sh) where all models are hosted in an attested secure hardware enclave, making the inference end-to-end private. Full disclosure: I'm one of the cofounders.
[1] https://cdn.openai.com/trust-and-transparency/openai-law-enf...
Just use it through something like Azure. They host the entire model and serve it from the US. I'm sure that there are other providers like this.
We use it that way and it works great.
This is a risk although then this is fortunately a model that isn't tied to Chinese hosting. But indeed something to consider if using straight DeepSeek.com.
I think there is a nonzero chance of that happening. Beijing could at any point decide that DeepSeek has become too powerful and/or is a major export and start to insert themselves (assuming they have not already).
There are widespread reports about how foreign actors (not limited to China) have infiltrated critical networks across many industries in the US en masse and are simply waiting for the right time to exploit them. Frontier models are simply another attack vector (and much more easily exploitable when you think about it).
The fact is that there is potential for this with any cloud-hosted model, whether it is intentional by the actual company building the models or a malicious actor is able to exploit a vulnerability.
User data integrity definitely should be a concern. It's also known that regulations is being outpaced, so the cost of being/using frontier products is a double-edged sword for sure.
More likely? US tech leaders have been fully capitulating to the surveillance state for over a decade. Why do I care what China does with my data? I don’t live in China and never plan to.
The tech bro threat model has always been pure jingoism and xenophobia. Ironically, the worst thing a Chinese company has done with my data is sell Tiktok to an American technofascist.
their MLA architecture cuts KV cache by ~5-13x vs standard attention. that's why inference is actually cheaper to run, not just a price war to gain market share.
That's also a game changer for local inference. It unlocks long contexts, batched inference and storing the KV cache to disk on ordinary consumer platforms.
Maybe the Chinese are playing the long game by trying to bankrupt the US competition? Because there's no way this is financially viable.
If you think heavily subsidizing AI models isn’t financially viable, I have some bad news for you about US AI companies.
Deepseek has made some incredible advancements in model efficiency, and more importantly actually publishes those advancements so everyone can benefit from them.
Small team, cheap electricity, very efficient models. Many western companies operate at a loss to gain market share. Why can't the Chinese?
Inference is cheap. I bet the financials of these Chinese companies are much saner looking than any of the big US AI companies which are bloated by investors.
US suppliers are fine and won't go bankrupt, they can just focus on serving bigger "Pro" class models from their large datacenters. In fact cheap AI makes the bigger and smarter models more useful because it's smart enough to draft a clear question to the model, which helps minimize wasted tokens.
Federal ban incoming then. They did it with cars already.
Props to them. That makes DeepSeek v4 Pro extremely cheap compared to others, even in the same category. Look at these prices per million outputs tokens:
DeepSeek V4 Pro: $0.87
Qwen 3.7 Max: $7.50
Grok 4.3: $2.50
GLM 1.5: $3.08
Opus 4.7: $25.00
GPT-5.5: $30.00
It's actually even cheaper when you look at the cache read costs. Those costs can dominate in agent workflows and DeepSeek's cost for cache reads is insanely low comparatively. At $.003626/M tokens, the cheapest other thing on your list is >$.2/M tokens. That's on the scale of 100x cheaper.
I found that DSV4 wasn't as cheap as its token price. It burns tokens at a pretty high rate
Great! I have been using DeepSeek 4 Flash high for everything lately.
First accessible model with useable 1 million context window for me.
Honestly I haven't even tried the Pro model. Flash was just so much more than I expected I just keep working with it. Thank you deepseek team
Anyone using deepseek through a gateway (not sure if right term) so there's no data retention? At work we're going through a few hundred million tokens a day in our app (using anthropic models), and we're looking for something significantly cheaper
Use it through Azure! Azure hosts DeepseekV4-Pro and DeepseekV4-Flash themselves. We're using it and it works great.
You don't get the discount that Deepseek is providing, but it's still a cheap model (v4-pro is cheaper than sonnet)
I have been using deepseek via deepinfra, afaik they provide no data retention. Im probably going to deploy the full model on their infra instead of paying credits at some point, so far the experience has been pretty good
But do these prices apply if you use a third party go-between? I would expect they then charge their own prices?
opencode allegedly has contractual no-data-retention policies with their providers.
I recall reading about that in an issue or in their Discord server.
But I would contact them formally to verify that.
Neat. I like DS for secondary checks on code. Sometimes spots things other models don't
is this the Huawei chip difference?
Even at these prices I find claude and codex subscriptions to be cheaper than per-token pricing when my usage is hovering around the session limits. I guess the subscriptions are heavily subsidized.