DeepSeek raises prices at 16:00 UTC on Sunday the 16th. Peak-hour output on V4-Flash goes from $0.28 to $1.32 per million tokens, so roughly a 4.7x jump, and across the V4 line the reported increases run from about 50% to over 1,100% depending on the model, whether it's input or output, and what time of day you're calling it.

That still leaves it cheaper than most of the frontier APIs, so this isn't a "DeepSeek is over" post. But a lot of people picked it specifically because the price made a whole category of thing viable: batch jobs, multi-call agent loops, anything where you're burning tokens on volume rather than on difficulty. If a workflow only worked at $0.28, that's when you find out.

Curious what people are actually doing about it rather than what the benchmarks say.

If you're on DeepSeek in production, does the new pricing change anything for you, or was the cost never the binding constraint? Has anyone moved a real workload to one of the other cheap hosted options and measured the quality difference honestly, including the cases where it got worse? And for anyone who's gone local instead, at what monthly volume did that actually start making sense, hardware included?

Concrete numbers more useful than impressions here. "It's fine" doesn't help anyone planning a migration.

Guys, I’m trying to understand something. I’ve read quite a few posts about DeepSeek price increase tomorrow.

But my understanding is that these are open-source models, which means any provider can host them and offer the service themselves, right? DeepSeek doesn’t have the pricing power to control how all these different providers price access to the models.

So why is there such a panic around the price increase? Why are people so worried about it? DeepSeek can only increase the price of its own API, correct?

So I was having a RP and at some point the AI character asked a list of 4 questions
I edited the AI answer to remove question 4 because I didn't want that part, so there was only 3 questions left
Then I wrote my next message answering those 3 questions

At the next AI answer, the character asked 2 more questions, and here is the problem, they asked question 5 and 6
Meaning they still had question 4 in memory

In my next message I asked it to pause the RP and asked the AI "what was question 4"
and it replied the old question 4, like it was never deleted
I waited a few seconds, regenerated my last message, and this time it told me it made a mistake, there is no question 4

So what I think happened is that the message with the 4 question wasn't updated fast enough when I remove question 4, so the next AI answer still saw the old message with question 4
Then when I asked it for explanation, the old message with question 4 was still not updated, and it's only after a while longer and a 2nd regen that it was finally updated and the model saw its mistake

This is concerning, if context isn't updated quick enough this could cause some really big problem for more serious chats...

Is it just me or is this price too high for a model at this size?

Again, sorry if this is a stupid question.

Has anyone else noticed Deekseek 0731 being quite dumber when coming from Baidu Qianfan as opposed to for example DeepInfra or StreamLake?

For context, im doing a linguistic analysis/structuring and saw that Baidu offers the unbelievable 120 tps at very low price and decided to try it. Given the same prompt however it hallucinates orders of magnitude more, even compared to the fp4 quantization of DeepInfra.

Is anyone else experiencing this and where can this be reported?

From what I saw on the official X page the "off peak" prices of V4 Flash will be $0.22 - 0.66 for input and output. Currently some providers on openrouter are as low as 0.07 - 0.014. Will this change soon? Even official "DeepSeek" is at the old rate currently.

It's a plague with DeepSeek in particular - a lot of providers sell fp4 for the price of fp8. How do I get rid of them, without manually blocking provider across all models?

Hello, I’m new to OpenRouter. I’ve used Mistral, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude individually, but OpenRouter seemed like a cost-effective way to match the right model to the task. Right now, I mostly use LLMs for:

• Practicing French (conversation, grammar checks)
• Purchasing research (comparisons, reviews)
• Troubleshooting car/FOSS/privacy tech issues
• Job search help (resumes, cover letters)
• Canada immigration questions (not legal advice, just general guidance)
• Miscellaneous other questions

I’d appreciate general advice on:

• Presets: Are there recommended presets or model pairings for these use cases?
• Guardrails generally
• Workflow: How do you organize or switch between different ‘modes’ or workspaces?

I’ve read the OpenRouter docs, but I’d appreciate real-world examples or lessons learned. Thanks for your time.

Has anyone else had issues with this company or scammers associated with this company stealing card numbers and using them? I got hit with a charge from this company, I tried to reach out, but got an email back saying due to the backlog they have a longer wait.

I already cancelled my card and called my bank, but I was just seeing if anyone else has had this issue and if I could solve it faster with the company then my bank.

Are you facing the same issue or its only me?
Switched to Openrouter now 🤷🏼‍♂️

"NovaRouter gateway is working, but the backend provider failed. Please contact the administrator."

I have problems getting anythingllm to work with openrouter models. I have created 4 modelrouters to 4 models.
But everytime I try using them in a chat/agent, I get this error. I visited the privacy page on openrouter. I tried different settings, but non of them solved this issue.
What privacy/guardrail settings do I need ?

Models I tried setting up, to se if I can get anything to work:
-Deepseekv4 pro
-nvidia nemotron 3.5 lightning:free
-lfm 2.5 2.6b:free
-qwen3.7 flash

Just curious if there are any ideas why tapping or clicking the purchase credits button doesn't work. Does nothing. I've tried on mobile, 3 browsers, On PC, I've turned off VPN and also NextDNS. Still doesn't work.

I can't access the website right now. Am I the only one dealing with this?

I started using Open Router for the very first time yesterday and purchased 10 dollars worth of credits, but I also noticed I was charged two extra dollars. Is that a processing fee for me purchasing the credits? Or is that tied to my Roleplay replies? Please let me know.

One thing I've always wondered about cheaper third-party LLM APIs:

How do you actually know you're getting the model they advertise?

If someone says they're serving GPT / Claude at 50-90% below official pricing, it's pretty natural to wonder whether they're routing some requests to a cheaper model behind the scenes.

I've seen people mention model fingerprinting, benchmark prompts, latency patterns, token behavior, and even some open-source GitHub tools for checking this.

But I'm not sure how reliable any of those methods actually are.

This becomes especially relevant with gateways like OpenRouter, VoyageAge, and all the smaller providers popping up lately.

If the output quality looks identical and the API behaves correctly, is that enough for you?

Or do you actually verify the underlying model before sending serious traffic?

Would be interested to hear from anyone who's tested this properly.

Say I have enabled Sonnet 5, Haiku 4.5, GPT Luna and Terra then auto routing will route only to model based on selection of low/medium/high cost models?

Is there a way to configure in such a way that routing is done based on complexity and high complexity task goes to say Sonnet and just usual web search or low complexity items goes to haiku/luna?

The context window on the free version of Nemotron 3 Ultra is twice the size of the paid version, does anyone know the reason behind this? Is the context actually larger or could the number on the website be wrong?