[827a]

Unfortunately, the market doesn't generally let you buy Blackwells with "we got half a percent of Google's marketshare with a model we're literally giving away for free [1]". You need that thing we call Capital. But, they may certainly opt to have it written on their gravestone, as Google is (checks notes) continuing to put Gemini on billions of devices and doing quadrillions of tokens per month.

[1] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash:free

[runako]

This is a bizarre comment for a couple of reasons.

First, obviously everyone involved understands that someone has to pay to provide a free service. Everyone involved also knows that this sometimes makes sense as a business strategy (I have not paid to ship anything from Amazon for close to two decades).

Second, OpenRouter's business model specifically does not require them to run all (any?) of the models available through the platform. Provider is one of the choices when you choose a model, and each provider can have separate pricing.

The link you posted shows only one provider, Crucible. That may/may not be affiliated with OpenRouter? Even assuming an affiliation, it's opaque who is subsidizing this usage. Is it OpenRouter or Crucible?

All of this is somewhat of a distraction. Even if someone gave search away for free (like Google), it would still be an accomplishment to get to half a percent of Google's volume. Or to sell half a percent of the volume of Android phones. Or whatever.

Kudos to the OpenRouter team!

[827a]

In the statement "we got half a percent of Google's marketshare with a model we're literally giving away for free" the term "we're" here refers to the conglomeration of "DeepSeek" (for making a model small enough to be capable of being hosted for free) and the model providers who do offer it for free (why they do this is... unknowable). It does not refer to OpenRouter, who are merely middlemen.

My original DeepSeek v4 Flash token counts spanned all providers of that model, both paid and free; I merely pointed out the free provider to substantiate a point that DeepSeek's product may be so bad that they could quite literally give it away and people would still prefer to pay (a lot) to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Why this is the case, I leave as a exercise to the reader; I'm just citing numbers and facts.