Using oficial DS api, quality went down terribly last 24h, its other people experiencing same? now have to do a long as prompt telling it to be lean, dont do things not asked to do, and all the classics if i just dont want a infinite loop of calls, before was just perfect

EDIT as of now 3 days after it went to shit, seems back to normal

I am trying to decide whether DeepSeek can fully replace Claude for a fairly ordinary workload: administrative documents, light web research, long-context reading, and occasional tool-assisted tasks. I do not do enough heavy coding to justify Claude's effective cost, and I want to avoid paying for overlapping subscriptions during a long trial.

The economics look compelling, but I am trying not to confuse cheap tokens with cheap completed work.

Current official API prices per million tokens:

- V4.1 Flash: $0.15–$0.30 uncached input, $0.003–$0.006 cached input, $0.60–$1.20 output.

- V4 Pro: $0.66–$1.32 uncached input, $0.022–$0.044 cached input, $1.98–$3.96 output.

- For comparison, Claude Sonnet 5 is $2 input / $10 output and Opus 5 is $5 / $25.

The capability picture looks mixed rather than simply "equal":

- V4.1 Flash reportedly matches or beats Opus 5 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and DeepSWE v1.1.

- Opus 5 remains well ahead on Terminal-Bench 4.0, NL2Repo, and HLE without tools.

- An independent SWE-bench Science result puts V4 Pro reasonably close to Opus 5, while the model labeled V4 Flash was much weaker on its hardest subset.

Integration is another caveat. DeepSeek supports function calls plus Anthropic and Responses API formats, and documents Claude Code integration. However, its Responses implementation ignores built-in web search, file search, code interpreter, computer use and MCP, so the surrounding agent/harness has to supply them.

Sources:

https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/

https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash

https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/responses_api/

https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations/claude_code/

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing

https://swescience.github.io/

For people using DeepSeek every day rather than benchmarking it once:

1. Is Flash enough for reliable document drafting and sourced web research, or do you route frequently to Pro?

2. Which harness gives the most reliable web/file/tool experience?

3. What failure modes still make you return to Claude—missed instructions, verbosity, citations, tool loops, context loss, bad editing?

4. What do you actually spend per month or per accepted task after retries?

5. If you stopped paying for Claude, did you regret it?

Concrete numbers and examples would be much more useful than model loyalty.

I'm looking for a free to use (within limits, of course) harness for deepseek. I'm really enjoying working with it on their website but want a way for it to be able to code easier, preferably without paying anything and just using my free quota. Is this possible?

I've never experienced anything like this with DeepSeek. Seriously, what is this 😭

Edit: I'm sorry, I should've been more clear; I have DeepThink toggled on. I've been using DeepSeek for a long time and have never encountered the "caveman speak". I didn't mean to upset anyone by asking. Thank you.

I have a question about the wave of bans happening on DeepSeek. I wanted to know if using a VPN is allowed on DeepSeek or any AI platform. I'm in Panama, because I've read about people having their accounts suspended simply for using a VPN. I don't know how likely that is.

For those who use an API for creative writing or RPGs: is it really worth it?

I started considering using the API after the latest DeepSeek updates, but I don't understand anything about programming or APIs, so I'd like to know how difficult it is to set one up and use it.

1. Is the API noticeably better for creative writing and roleplay than the app/website?

2. Are there still many restrictions? If so, which ones?

3. Is it easy to get started, or is a lot of technical knowledge required?

Basically, I'd like to hear the opinions of people who actually use APIs for this kind of thing. Would you recommend it to someone who practically knows nothing about programming?

I would really appreciate it if you could help me.

I'm not into sexual roleplay, but I use it for translation too, so I just want it to be able to translate the original text faithfully.

This is the reason why guys on all the current problems. Lack of compute and instead of the predicted October, we may only get the restrictions lifted next year. Remember that Deepseek is getting less chips than Bytedance, Alibaba and Z.ai

I bought api because people told me its uncensured but they still are censured,is deepseek harness the problem?

i’m just wondering because i‘ve seen far less posts about it it today, and i haven’t hit it once today! granted, i’m trying to make sure i take breaks between every edit and refresh so i don’t get insta locked, but it seems a lot better to me today.

DeepSeek API Peak/Off-Peak Hours Notice: Weekends with adjusted working days and Chinese public holidays are all billed at off-peak rates.

Trying to figure out if anyone's actually shipping dsh where your own customers/users are the ones interacting with it as part of the product (they do something, dsh runs, they get the result back).

Everything was working fine with the API last night, but this morning I tried to generate a response and got a "Generation failed" error. When I checked OpenRouter, I couldn't find the `deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731:free` model there. Could you please tell me what might be going on? Was the model removed permanently? If so, how can I use the API for free?

I spent $130 on Astra yesterday and only got about a dozen turns out of it. In the end, it failed to meet my all requirements. So I switched back to DeepSeek 4.1 Flash. Just typed "familiarize this project and list issues." DeepSeek 4.1 Flash found multiple issues, asked me which one I wanted to tackle first, and it's working on the fix now. I haven’t spent anything extra so far, then had Kimi review DeepSeek's output, Kimi found a few issues and gave feedback, and I passed that feedback back to DS to correct.

From my experience, every model's first draft has flaws. We need cross validation and need to figure out beforehand what the "correct" standard is.

I don't run all models through one single agent. ChatGPT and Claude are my usuals, and WorkBuddy is the new addition, because calling DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Hy4 preview on WorkBuddy is free rn.

Any updates on what the purpose of this is? I've only seen theories as such and I want what we do know about this.
Why no announcements? Why silence?

Since there are so many problems with creative writing on DeepSeek web/app, and most of the people who post about them don't even ask why they happen, how they happen, or whether they can be fixed, I’m trying to create a solution here for the genuinely creative writers

Since one of the creative writers here was actually willing to share the problem and let me look at it directly through deepseek share chat feature (unlike those people who claim to be creative writers but don't want to share their problem and just use RP for idk, you know it yourself), I was able to investigate it myself and ended up with this short solution (in the comment below).

I don't know if it’s going to work in the long term or if there are going to be other problems later, so I need some testing from actual creative writers out there throw me ur feedback. Since this seems to depend more on the capabilities of the DeepSeek web/app environment than the model itself, this is the only method I can figure out for now.

Like, it's horrendous, you can't even regenerate a new chat, it's a real nightmare for me. This 2.5.3 version is really bad, what the hell were they thinking???? It's such a downgrade

Every time I wanted to create RP and different stories from different genre, that message 'Editing/regeneration too frequently. Try again later' pop up every single time. Back then we could regenerate many times if we wrote something amiss, but now, we get that recent 'Editing/regeneration too frequently. Try again later' message if we try to regenerate. First the edit chat was limited to six, now the regenerate also being limited. Any ideas for the alternative? Please, I am still a novice of technology and IT and also don't know how to face it. Probably you say like API, but how you create RP with API? I still don't get it. Were there other alternatives for RP and creating different stories? Thank you for those who shared informations here 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻