Fun while it lasted. Stripe is close with the US gov and Kushner family, so the days of using Chinese models are probably numbered. Stripe will be pushing everyone to whatever APIs they get the most revenue from in return.
I think AA's intelligence/cost plot is seriously misleading, so I decided to make my own. Their plot is in the second image.
All points are at max thinking. All intelligence index scores are from AA. All cost scores are from AA too except where noted below.
What changes between AA's plot and mine:
Note: not including the cost of hardware stops being defensible once you upgrade to a 128GB Strix Halo (almost nobody needs that much RAM if not for AI). This is why I did not add self-hosted DeepSeek IQ2_XXS to the chart; it would likely also sit lower on the intelligence axis than the MXFP4 native model. Same argument for a ~$16k rig needed to run GLM-5.3 IQ4 locally. I'm not saying they're not worth the expense (privacy is priceless), just that pegging them on the plot is a much more nuanced exercise.
Hi i have a question I put 10$ in openrouter and I haven’t realised until now that it got below zero I don’t plan on using openrouter anymore so do I need to pay the 0.12$ or no? I don’t know anything about the website so I’m confused
My setup: Claude Max ($200/mo), with Fable as the master orchestrator on top of my own custom made harness. Fable plans, then summons Opus for judgment work and Sonnet for grunt work. Works great, but I'm hitting my weekly limits and needed an expansion.
So I swapped Opus and Sonnet for GLM and DeepSeek through OpenRouter as the overflow lane. Put $10 in as a trial. Real example: a task to investigate why my clients weren't getting their credentials after signup, fix it, and backfill the missing emails — cost $2 on GLM/DeepSeek. The same job on Claude barely dents my daily quota. At this burn rate the "cheap" lane costs about the same as a second Max subscription.
I know part of the answer: Max gives you way more API-equivalent compute than the $50/week sticker, so comparing raw OpenRouter spend against subscription quota isn't fair. And I've read that OpenRouter's proxy breaks prompt caching for DeepSeek, so agentic loops re-pay full input price every step. I even had Fable pick the cheapest providers with caching enabled — still burned.
So for the people actually saving money with Chinese models:
Genuinely asking, not hating. I want them in my stack but the math isn't mathing.
[effacé]
https://daugasauron.github.io/piodide/
https://github.com/daugasauron/piodide
I just had this idea that you could just replace the bash tool in pi with python that runs on WASM, then you could run the whole thing in the browser.
Tried it and it's quite fascinating how good it is as a concept.
Everything is complete slop.
I tried GLM (code), OpenAI and moonshot providers.
It was fun while it lasted, but I see Luna is back up to $1.20.
At half price for me it was hands down the best value model for coding.
Honestly it's probably still a good deal even at that price, but I'm wondering for coding at that price does it still hold the top spot, or are you guys using something else?
From time to time, the UI I use with OpenRouter cuts off the answer. I’m not sure why, but I wonder if setting an allowed providers list could reduce the number of incomplete answers. Would that work? Which providers would you recommend?
I'm building an app and experimenting with claude code connected to free openrouter models, and I was wondering if upgrading to 10 usd will actually make a difference, when using free models
Looking into starting a service hosting some open-source models. I know the big companies still lose money on this even with scale, but I'm more interested in what regular users would actually pay and what they'd need to switch from their current provider.
Please reply in this format if you can:
Personally I'd want something like:
What would it take for you to switch?
​
Hi everyone, I noticed that about a day ago we got a free glm endpoint hosted by Decart, at the start it seemed to have some reliability issues but now it looks good at a consistent near 100%.
After the DeepSeek price increase, what are you guys using now — official DeepSeek API or OpenRouter?
I’m leaning toward OpenRouter for convenience, but the cache miss issue seems to make it much more expensive sometimes.
What’s your experience?
I usually use ds in off-peak hr and for hermes
Why are you guys switching? DSV4 Flash's price looks unchanged on OR.
Buenas, Gente de Silly Tavern, soy nuevo en la plataforma y me gustaria saber cual es el mejor modelo de openrouter para colocar en Silly Tavern, actualmente yo uso el modelo llamado "Deepseek V4 Pro 0423" veo que los modelos Deepseek son muy buenos para Roleplay ya que contienen muy poca censura para contenido NSFW y son muy inteligentes con muchísimos parámetros, y un gran tamaño de contexto de 1 Millón de tokens.
¿Alguien me puede ayudar a decirme algo mejor que el modelo "Deepseek V4 Pro 0423" o eso seria el punto máximo que podria colocar actualmente?
Feels very unrelated buy, but open router pricing gonna skyrocket now 😢!
Hello all, I'm fairly new to the whole Llm space and could really use some guidance from people who've done similar work.
Im building a pipeline to extract structured data from large-batch of invoices. The quality of those files is very inconsistent, while some files are fairly fine, most are skewed, partly faded, and some parts are just crossed and handwritten, often even the text is positioned incorrectly.
So far, i've tried multiple vision-models(a mix of hosted APIs and open-weight models through providers), but results have been mixed - either the accuracy drops hard on smaller open weight models like qwen 8b, larger open-weight models (tried Qwen 235B) are held back by unreliable hosting — out of every 4 calls, roughly 1 comes back successful and 3 return with no output at all, and hosted APIs get expensive fast and unpredictably(gemini charged me like 5$ for a single pdf with 50 pages)
Would appreciate any recommendations!
Hey y’all, I need to learn as much about OpenRouter as possible, does anyone have any advice on what specific pieces of content to consume? Wish me luck
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.
