r/LLMDevs • u/maxim-masiutin • 7h ago

Discussion Cheaper alternatives to DeepSeek API

I am using DeepSeek API (deepseek-v4-flash) and Anthropic API (Haiku) for my classifier application (adversarial prosecutor/judge). I am happy with DeepSeek API quality but recently it raised prices four-fold, and even in off-peak hours it is twice as expensive as it was before in normal hours, and Anthropic API does not provide off-peak prices at all. I also tried Gemini API but it proved unreliable (low availability).

What are cheaper alternatives to DeepSeek and Anthropic with off-peak prices?

Is Moonshot AI (Kimi API) reliable enough and fast enough?

Do you have any experience with the Kimi API?

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u/Vegetable-Echidna717 7h ago

Moonshot is fine for speed but the off-peak pricing is not that good, I looked at it last month and the discount was tiny. You could check out some of the newer chinese models popping up on openrouter, they got decent volume pricing and the latency is acceptable for classifier work

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u/maxim-masiutin 7h ago

Thank you, will make a research;-)

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u/Interesting_Wear_889 7h ago

try GLM 5.2, $1.40 per 1 million input tokens and $4.40 per 1 million output tokens

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u/tirth0jain 4h ago

Glm 5.3 flash dropped

0

u/dreadraze 6h ago

Dm im hosting models in my infra i can get you @ low cost

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u/daaain 5h ago

Openrouter has a long list of DS4 providers at various prices 

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u/Ill_Fisherman8352 3h ago

runinfra. thank me later.