u/NeuralNomad87

Everything in here turns into ChatGPT versus Claude versus Gemini eventually, which is fair enough because that's what most people use. I'm more interested in the other line on your bank statement.

So: one tool you actually pay for, and the one thing it does that the big three can't. A single line is fine, nobody needs a writeup.

Mine is a dedicated PDF table extractor. I spent months feeding scanned invoices to general assistants and getting tables back that looked completely right and had numbers in the wrong columns, which is worse than failing outright. Paying for something that does only that one job fixed it.

Free tools count if you'd pay for them. And if you reckon the thing you're paying for is actually replaceable by a general assistant now, say that instead. Just as useful to know.

Tuesday head to head. One category, two tools, and I want the one line answer rather than a writeup.

The category is looking something up: a fact you need to be right about, a product you are comparing, a question where you want sources you can click.

Some people never really opened Perplexity because ChatGPT's search got good enough. Some people keep it around specifically because it puts the sources in front of you and makes it obvious when the answer is thin. Both of those are reasonable and I don't think there's one right answer here.

So: which one do you actually open, and what made you land there?

If you dropped one of them, say what the last straw was. That's usually the more useful half.

And if you use neither and something else won, say that too.

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.

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.

One line is fine. Tool, what you're using it for, and whether it's earning its keep so far.

It doesn't need to be new or impressive. If you're just working out whether something you already pay for is still worth the money, that counts.

Mine: running a cheaper model against my default on long document summarising, to find out whether the gap is actually big enough to justify what I'm paying.

Also, if you asked something here in the last week or two and nobody answered, put the link in a reply. Easier to get eyes on it here than to bump a dead thread.

Trying something new. Every Sunday I'll pull out the answers from the past week that actually helped someone and name the people who wrote them.

u/Slight-Living-8098 on the clipping thread, pointing out that if you just want to cut a long video into shorter segments, FFMPEG already does that and every modern editor is built on it anyway. Best answer in the sub this week was basically "you don't need an AI tool for this."

u/sharktank123456 on the poster thread, asking how big the poster actually is, because a one metre poster needs roughly 10k pixels vertically and that means an upscaler on top of whatever generator you pick. Nobody else had mentioned resolution.

u/RandomlySomewhereNow gave a worked example instead of a tool name: their restaurant shifts get posted weekly, so once a week Claude checks the email and puts the shifts in their calendar. One "here is what I actually do" beats ten tool lists.

u/orid7 on whether a paid chatbot can predict Polymarket outcomes. Said don't use it for the probability itself, use it for decomposition, and disclosed up front that they build in that niche. That is how to post here when you have skin in the game.

u/Extension-Quote-2709 on photo editing, with a ranked shortlist and the honest caveat that no single platform does everything well.

Two things, both quick. If someone answered your question this week and it helped, link their comment below. And if you asked something that never got a reply, post the link here and I'll take a crack at it.

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.

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.