[NitpickLawyer]

> The DeepSeek provider on OpenRouter is only the 5th-cheapest for V4 Flash

You might have the default settings on your account, which limit Deepseek as a provider. If you disable that feature you see them on openrouter as well (and they serve it at the same cost as their own API).

[0xbadcafebee]

I just checked my settings and I have everything enabled. https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash?sort=price (per-1M price) shows DeepSeek provider as #5. https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash/pricing?sor... (effective price) shows them as #3. The effective price will change your total cost since each provider has a different price for input vs output vs cache, so what's #1 and #5 for one person could be #5 and #1 for somebody else, depending on their workload.

However, I just double checked, and OpenRouter's pricing page for Flash v4 with DeepSeek provider shows a cache hit rate of $0.0028, which is the same as on DeepSeek's official API pricing page ($0.0028), so they do seem to be the same price, (assuming DeepSeek is able to pin your specific OpenRouter requests to the same DeepSeek server). OpenRouter adds 5% to that cost, but still it might be cheaper than the other providers.

Also just found out OpenRouter has a new feature "Response Caching" where they can cache identical requests and return them immediately with no billing. The entire request must be identical, though, not just a prefix, and you have to enable this feature. I don't know who would need to send multiple identical requests, but it's better than nothing?

[NitpickLawyer]

Interesting, it seems we have some providers offering dsv4-flash cheaper than ds themselves. For the full model it's the other way around, all 3rd party providers are 2x+ more expensive.

[0xbadcafebee]

The cheaper ones are fp4 and fp8 whereas I assume DeepSeek provider is unquantized, so that probably accounts for it. DeepSeek also doesn't necessarily have the cheapest hardware, other providers could be using it as a loss leader, etc

[throwa356262]

I belive no sane provider, antropic and openai included, serve BF16.

Side note: I suspect Antropic was experimenting with changing quant level based on server load a few months back which is what caused that major quality drop we saw then.