First accessible model with useable 1 million context window for me.
I recall reading about that in an issue or in their Discord server.
But I would contact them formally to verify that.
What's frustrating is that they give no information on who the provider(s) are!
You don't get the discount that Deepseek is providing, but it's still a cheap model (v4-pro is cheaper than sonnet)
Nearly all requests are cached now. It's amazing.
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 doesn't matter how good Opus is if 2 months into your subscription they make it worse than GPT 3 to save money.
I can't claim it's "the best"...
But the Pi.dev and OpenRouter combo is what I'm doing at home, and I love it. Setup was easy, I can use /model to switch between any of the openrouter models and whatever I'm hosting locally via VLLM.
I tried it and it's impressive.
[1]: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...
Later, they can always lock it down more or add Claude LLM only features to it.
It's basically not possible with claude code, the api endpoint is a single environment variable and whatever models are on that endpoint are what's available.
HOWEVER, if you run a proxy like LiteLLM, you can configure it to send requests to different api endpoints on the back end and expose them as different "models" on the front end, then configure claude code to switch between those virtual models.
Which begs the question, regardless of the model, which Claude Code alternative is better? (I keep saying "Claude Code alternative" because I don't know the term... LLM CLI?)
https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to... (the pi-coding-agent section)
# After installed (or when run portably with ./ccode)
ccode init-config
ccode edit-config
# Run with default profile
ccode
# Run with named profile
ccode --deepseek
# Set default profile
ccode set-default-profile deepseek
Overall though I'm not sure exactly how well Claude Code would stack up against OpenCode, since the latter overall feels a bit less hacky with 3rd party models and is even getting niche but nice features like a locally runnable web version: https://opencode.ai/docs/web/
I did some back of the envelope calculations and it seems like you would pay $5/month using DeepSeek directly or $15-20 with OpenRouter or similar. But would be interested to hear real world usage.
It's not good enough to fully replace any of the frontier models yet but it's definitely great to have as a backup!
I used DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Qwen, and MiMO against GPT-5.5 high as reference, all running in Pi harness without anything installed.
So far, Kimi and MiMO look the most promising to me. I haven’t tested them rigorously enough to make a strong statement, but my first impression is that, in practice, all those models may be less behind on typical daily tasks than people think.
They are a bit “work hard, not smart". Getting to same-ish results more slowly and using more tokens, but at a fraction of the price
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.
I'm not sure if it's when you run out of crypto, or when your bank gets hit by ransomeware.
DeepSeek likely operates at a loss. How big the loss is anyone's guess.
Meanwhile I am happy using their model. It is really good, to a point I forget I am not using Codex or Claude.
Deepseek has made some incredible advancements in model efficiency, and more importantly actually publishes those advancements so everyone can benefit from them.
I suspect American inference providers implement the efficiency gains, and pad their margins rather than pass the savings along to the consumer.
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?
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.
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...
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.
We use it that way and it works great.
If I was working on something that the Chinese government considered of strategic importance, then I would certainly be worried about it. But I don't do that.
I'm much more worried about techbros in this country using their LLMs to extensively profile me and produce something vastly more dystopian in this country than the real or imagined social credit scores in China. The people trying to convince you that the Chinese government are the people you should be worried about (as an individual in the United States) are probably the people you really need to be worried about.
RIP.
Claude literally refuses to finish tasks in auto mode and just keeps saying, now is a good stopping point, when it's 1% done (and doing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I tell it).
Codex is barely better...
May as well pay 1/20th the price for DeepSeek.
Claude seems to have something that looks at how long you've been a customer and then just massively degrades quality.
When I started my subscription, Claude had none of these problems.
2 months into subscriptions Claude is completely unusable garbage, and Codex is not much better.
China is gonna win long term there’s no doubt. The fact that the American firms haven’t created immense escape velocity despite the disparity in spending is quite telling.
That's more than good enough if you're actually getting what CC Opus is capable of.
I've never been so excited for the future.
I am completely convinced they just screw over their customers after so much usage or so long of a subscription thinking they have them for life.
I have NEVER been so happy to cancel a subscription.
I'll keep running Flash locally for the stuff I care about data privacy, but the value of Pro through their API is unreal for anything else (and I want to give them my training data as long as they keep putting out open models).
Remember Jevons paradox? [0] It isn't at Anthropic or Microsoft [0], but it is at DeepSeek.
[0] https://www.thelowdownblog.com/2026/05/microsoft-cancels-int...
Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings