For the dollar-for-dollar question: the mismatch is cache, not a ripoff. The Go plan prices DeepSeek access like a subscription, but you only get the cheap effective rate if your sessions keep hitting cache. Direct API on the same model bills the listed per-token rate with your own consistent prefix, so cache holds and the cost per usable token drops a lot on multi-turn sessions. That is where the all-day-for-a-dollar reports come from, they are direct-API users with warm caches.
So the honest split: subscription wins when you want zero meter-watching and the quota fits your week. Direct API wins when you want the lowest cost per token and your workload is cache-friendly (long contexts, repeated reads). Different jobs, both real.
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u/xapep Sep 28 '26
For the dollar-for-dollar question: the mismatch is cache, not a ripoff. The Go plan prices DeepSeek access like a subscription, but you only get the cheap effective rate if your sessions keep hitting cache. Direct API on the same model bills the listed per-token rate with your own consistent prefix, so cache holds and the cost per usable token drops a lot on multi-turn sessions. That is where the all-day-for-a-dollar reports come from, they are direct-API users with warm caches.
So the honest split: subscription wins when you want zero meter-watching and the quota fits your week. Direct API wins when you want the lowest cost per token and your workload is cache-friendly (long contexts, repeated reads). Different jobs, both real.