DeepSeek V3 is easily the best cost / performance non-reasoning model on the market but accessing it via API is not straightforward -- at least for people who want their model hosted in the US. For the layperson OpenAI / Anthropic are much more accessible.
Some of OpenRouter's [0][1] providers seem bunk; their version is corrupted. Occasionally just get mangled outputs. Fireworks [2] is my best experience so far: their serverless API, haven't messed with custom deployments. Fast, performant, better than other models in its size category and less expensive.